When Leora Goff was eleven her mother had yet another baby, so Leora took on the job of caring for the setting hens, ones that brooded their eggs to hatch. She certainly enjoyed her job, as she’d always helped her mother with it before. She knew how to get a reluctant hen to “sit” on her eggs: Pluck up the hen and give her a ride, like a cartwheel in the air, until she is dizzy. She’ll sit.
“One of my jobs on the farm when I was growing up,” she wrote in her memoir, “was teaching calves to drink after taking them from their mothers. Some years there were as many as 20 calves. Another was raising chickens. With setting hens there had to be a coop for each hen and chickens, with about 15 little chicks each, and we always had wooden boxes in those days. We would have to shut each up at night to keep varmints from getting the little chickens and open up their boxes each morning and then feed the chickens. Sometimes we tied the mother by one foot or leg to keep her from roaming too far.”
After she married and had chickens of her own, Leora kept an account of the dates her hens began to brood, laying no more eggs but sitting on their nest, so she knew about when they would hatch, about three weeks later. She also recorded the number of other eggs she gathered in order to sell or trade what they didn’t use. Besides having a source of income, she enjoyed working with a flock of chickens.
A year later Leora stayed busy with nursing a baby, cooking, cleaning, washing and ironing, and tending her chickens. She sold eggs seven dozen at a time early in the year, then twenty-four dozen each time by March 1916. By July, this business woman had sold 350 dozen eggs, then she began selling chickens.
During 1924, Leora sold 135 chickens (earning 14 to 18 cents per pound) and 92 dozen eggs (earning 36-47 cents a dozen). Selling eggs and chickens enabled this mother of six youngsters to order a brand new Singer sewing machine through the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
“I raised a lot of good purebred chickens, Rhode Island Reds, setting hens mostly–had as many as 50 or more hens setting at one time. They had feed and water and were kept in an empty corncrib.”
After the Depression years, Clabe and Leora returned to living on a farm near Minburn where Leora kept a flock of chickens. As her sons left for the military, they’d send requests home–someone please take a photo of Dad with a fish or with Spats, let’s have one of Mom and her chickens. A couple of hens followed her around as she did her chores outside. She named them Henny Penny and Singing Jenny.
How about some chicken songs?