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Catching Chickens

We raised chickens for eggs until the early 1970s on the Waschke Homestead. About this time of year—around Halloween—family and neighbors on Waschke Road would gather one night with flashlights to sneak up on sleeping chickens. For the kids, it was exciting, for the adults, necessary work.

The process started in the spring with the arrival of a batch of newly hatched baby chicks. I can’t remember where Grandpa (Gus) got them. There were several chicken hatcheries in the county and I assume they came from one of them. The hatchlings came in corrugated cardboard boxes and went immediately into the brooder house, which hasn’t been used for at least fifty years now and has fallen into decay.

The first few weeks of life, the chicks stayed under the brooder hood, a sheet metal canopy about six feet long and three feet wide, suspended by a block and tackle from the rafters so it could be raised and lowered easily. The hood was heated with electric light bulbs. As chicks get older, they need less heat. By raising the hood a little bit each day, the chicks were kept at the right temperature. Before the chicks arrived, Grandpa would go over the brooder house, patching with tin any holes a rat could through. Predatory rats could eat several chicks in a single night if they could get into the brooder house. As spring turned to summer, the chicks were allowed first to roam around the brooder house, then let into a roofed area enclosed in chicken wire, later they went into a fenced yard surrounding the brooder house. By fall, the chicks, now pullets, were allowed to roam freely and seldom entered the brooder house. Most roosted in the orchard at night.

The chickens roamed all around the farmyard during the summer. Those free roaming young birds got me in big trouble once. One day, I caught one. For some unknowable reason, I thought it would fit perfectly in the glove compartment of our navy blue 1952 Dodge pickup. I tested my theory and found it correct. Later, Dad heard a chicken cackle when he started the pickup. He found the chicken and several days droppings in the glove compartment. I don’t remember my punishment, but I have never put a chicken in a glove compartment again.

As the days grew cooler and the nights longer, we began to keep an eye open for newly laid eggs in the yard. These eggs were often small, misshapen, or double-yoked as the pullets got the hang of laying. When we had found enough eggs, the young birds were ready to go into the regular chicken house and start producing eggs for sale.

The fun began with a long-distance call to Wallace Poultry on Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, where The Bagelry is now. Wallace bought the old hens and butchered them. By the time the old flock was ready to be replaced, the hens were looking bedraggled and, I imagine, were quite tough.

Throughout the year, Mom or Grandma would occasionally butcher and pluck a nice-looking hen for dinner but we didn’t eat much poultry on the farm. Neither my mom or grandma liked butchering and plucking chickens. According to them, chicken dinners were not worth all the trouble.

When it was time to replace the flock, the tough old hens were not candidates for the kitchen. Although the baby chicks were supposed to be all female, a few roosters always made it past the chick sexers, and they supplied all the poultry Mom and Grandma wanted to deal with through the summer and fall.

I always hoped the Wallace Poultry truck would arrive after I came home from school. The truck driver had a folding wire fence that he set up inside the chicken house and we would chase chickens into a corner and corral them with the wire fence. The driver grabbed the corralled chickens by the legs and loaded them into crates on his truck. When all the chickens were crated, he drove off, the chickens never to be seen again. Wallace Poultry was still in existence after we quit raising chickens, but Mom would never buy poultry from them because she remembered those scrawny old birds that they used to get from us.

During the year, one of my jobs was to clean the chicken house and spread fresh straw litter on Saturday mornings, a job I hated, and, I suspect, I didn’t do very well. After the Wallace Poultry truck left and the chicken house was empty, Dad would take a couple days to give it a thorough cleaning, removing every bit of litter, taking apart the laying nests, hosing everything down, spraying with carbolineum to eradicate mites and other parasites, then brightening the place up with hastily applied slaked lime white wash.

Crating the old chickens was more fun than cleaning the chicken house but the real fun came after the chicken house was cleaned and it was time to introduce the new hens to the chicken house. The new chickens were wild by fall; even with bribes of wheat or oats, you couldn’t get closer than a few feet. Catching a few with a leg hook was possible, but with two hundred birds to catch, hooking them would take too long.

Instead, we would wait for night when the chickens were sleeping in the orchard.

The men would use flashlights to spot the roosting birds and reach up and grab them by the legs. The chickens roosted close together and it was easy to grab two or three at a time. The caught birds would cackle and screech, but the others ignored them and obligingly waited to be caught. When I was big enough, my job was to carry the chickens from the catchers to the chicken house feed room, where I deposited them into a wooden barrel with a lid to keep them captured.

My grandpa would reach into the barrel, grab a chicken, give it a worming pill and let it loose in the chicken house proper. Getting those pills down the outraged birds was harder than it looked. Grandpa did it in one smooth motion before the chicken knew what was happening. When I tried, the wriggling bird drew blood with its beak and claws and got loose before I could shove the pill down its throat. After one failure, I left it to Grandpa.

When Grandpa died, Dad quit raising chicks and bought birds that were dewormed and ready to start laying.

There were almost always a few stragglers that eluded capture for a few days. I remember one year, a hen stayed loose until Christmas when Dad asked a neighbor to come over and shot it with a shotgun in return for the meat. My mother was very clear that she was not interested in plucking and dressing a chicken brought down by a shotgun blast.

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More on Waschke Road

Last week, I wrote about Waschke Road and speculated that the full two mile stretch of the right-of-way petitioned for in 1886 was used as a trail, but when my grandfather, Gus, opened up a lane from his house and barn to the Smith Road, the right-of-way was an unimproved trail.

A new source

This week, I spent some time studying the historic maps in James W. Scott and Daniel E. Turberville III’s Whatcom County in Maps 1832-1937. (Bellingham: Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, 1983.)

The 1902 map

The first map that shows Section 26 of Ferndale Township, where the Waschke Homestead is located, is a county map dated 1902. This map shows the Northwest Diagonal as a plank road and indicates it was the main road from the town of Whatcom (now Bellingham) to Ferndale and Blaine, following the route of Axton road past Barrett Lake (then called Gamble Lake) to Ferndale. The plank road continues to Blaine as a plank road roughly following the route of what is now called Vista Drive.

Axton Road from the Northwest east is shown as “opened” but not planked or graveled. Now, Axton goes straight east to the Guide Meridian and beyond, but on the 1902 map, it jogs northeast at about where it would intersect Waschke Road, if Waschke Road were there.

The Smith Road appears as “opened” like Axton Road, and runs its full present length from Tennant Lake to where it intersects the Northeast Diagonal, which became the Mount Baker Highway. There is no sign of either the Waschke Road or the Aldrich Road on the 1902 map.

North Bellingham School

There is a school marked at the corner of the Smith and the Northwest Diagonal. This was the location of North Bellingham Elementary School, which was my first school. My grandfather’s younger brother, Bill, would have been three years old at the time the map was drawn and must have attended the school marked on the map when he was old enough. Some of his older sisters probably went there also. When my father, Ted, started school at North Bellingham in about 1920, the school was a two-story wood building. My memory is a bit hazy, but I believe Dad said the school had two rooms on each floor. That may have been the building marked on the 1902 map or a later replacement. Dad said the principal was responsible for cutting firewood to keep the school heated.

Topographic map from 1907

The next important map is the 1907 Blaine Quadrangle topographic map, drawn two years before my grandparents were married. This map shows the Aldrich Road running from the Smith Road north to Tenmile Creek and the Axton Road going straight east from the Northwest to the Aldrich Road. The section of Waschke Road from the Northwest to the Larson Road shows as unimproved. Larson Road does not go through to the Northwest as it does now. However, the Lange Road, unlike today, goes through to the Northwest and on to the Brennan station on the railroad south of Tennant Lake. My dad remembered taking produce to the Brennan Station to load onto railroad cars. In his memory, it was just an unattended open shed.

Buildings in 1907

Standard Geological Survey topographic maps show buildings. The shingle mill mentioned in the newspaper clipping I referred to in the previous post is probably the mark on this map where Silver Creek crosses Waschke Road.

The houses of my great-grandparents Matzke and Waschke are also marked on this map, located across the Aldrich Road from each other. Both my great-grandparents built his houses near the top of the ridge that marks the boundary between the Silver and Deer Creek watershed. Both houses are still occupied. Later Gottlieb Waschke sold the north half of his property and built another house close to the Smith Road, which was eventually occupied by my grandfather’s brother Bill and later his son Buford.

1924

The last map of interest is from 1924. It looks as if the cartographer started from the 1902 map and added to it. This map shows the townships of Whatcom County. According to Scott and Turberville, Whatcom County and Spokane County were the only counties in Washington State to set up townships when they were authorized by the state legislature in 1896. The townships were responsible for the county roads within their jurisdiction. This map shows the right-of-way all the way from the Northwest Diagonal to Axton Road, and shows the Axton terminating at Aldrich Road. Unfortunately, the reproduction of the map in the Scott and Turberville book is smudged and I can’t determine the status of these routes. The map shows Lange Road still extending all the way to Brennan Station.

Skid road

None of the maps have any indication of the skid road along the southern boundary of the Waschke Homestead. The 1902 map mentions 92 shingle mills and 24 saw mills in the county with 5000 employees and capacity for 110 car loads of product per day. These mills must have kept the oxen busy pulling logs on the skid roads.

I will try to research this more at the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University. I now suspect the original petition for Waschke Road is archived there and I also might be able to find something there about the skid road.

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Waschke Road

I’ve written before about how my grandfather, Gus Waschke, picked the property straddling the Deer and Silver Creek watersheds. He chose the land with his plans to farm in mind, but the property was inaccessible without going through Agnes’ father’s property on the Aldrich Road. That was okay to start out, but it didn’t square with Gus’ plans for the future. He wanted a county road.

The right-of-way

Fortunately, or maybe part of his plan, there was already a county right-of-way for a road on the west side of the property. From a newspaper clipping, I discovered that a petition was filed in with the Whatcom County Board of Commissioners (which eventually became the County Council) on December 18, 1886 for a right-of-way that eventually became Waschke Road. 1886 was probably before any Waschke had arrived in Whatcom County.

According to the clipping, the right-of-way was for a two-mile stretch, but it didn’t say which two-mile stretch. However, the length is right for a road on the section line from Axton Road to the point where the section line intersects Northwest Drive. This is only guess, but it also corresponds to what I remember hearing about the right-of-way. If my guess is correct, the right-of-way was a public trail, but not all the planned road was built.

The road

I’ve marked on the map the locations of the present Waschke Road, the piece that Gus built according to my father Ted, and where I think the original petition for the right of way was located. There may have been some sort of trail opened before 1900. In the 1950s, there was an wooden bridge over Deer Creek where the right-of-way would have been that was used for cattle and farm equipment. It had washed away by the early 1960s and was not repaired. The old bridge is the only indication that the northern end of the right-of-way was ever used.

The south section

The newspaper clipping suggests that the southern section of the road was built first. That may be true. The clipping mentions a shingle mill where a branch of Silver Creek crosses Waschke Road. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, cedar shingle mills were sprinkled all over the county and the first part of the road may have been built to service the shingle mill.

You can see a gap in the road from Larsen north to the Whatcom County Public Works garage. My guess is that the right-of-way from Larsen Road to the Smith Road was used, but never developed. The entrance to the the Whatcom County Public Works garage is now an extension south of Smith Road to Waschke Road, but that is a later addition. In the 1950s and 1960s, there was no road.

The Northwest Diagonal

Northwest Drive, first called The Northwest Diagonal, was one of the first roads north from Bellingham Bay to the Canadian Border. I suspect it dates from around the Fraser River Goldrush of 1853, which was also about the time Whatcom County was established. The Northwest was the main route to Ferndale before the highway (now I-5) was built. The route turned west at the Axton Road and threaded along Deer Creek and Barrett Lake and across the Nooksack at Ferndale. As I understand it, until Portal Way was built, the main road from Ferndale to Custer and Blaine was what is now Vista Drive.

Gus’s lane

Around 1916 when the Waschke Homestead farmhouse was built, Gus cleared a lane from the house to Waschke Road along the right-of-way. Gus did the work, but the county supplied a few wagon loads of gravel. Over time, the county took more responsibility, adding more gravel and grading several times a year. In the 1950s, the neighbors on the road paid the county to oil the road, cutting down the dust and potholes.

The skidroad

Gus’s lane crossed a skid road marked the southern boundary of the homestead. My father Ted remembered strings of logs pulled by oxen to the Nooksack on the greased skids. I don’t know the route taken to the river, but my grandmother Agnes told me that she covered my dad’s ears so he could not hear the ox skinners cursing at the oxen.

The newspaper clipping, written in the early 1970s says the original petition is stored at the Whatcom County Courthouse. I am planning a visit to the courthouse to find it, if it still exists. I may have something to add to this post when I have seen the original.