| Chickens, hogs, and cows once roamed
Sidney’s streets as 19th century Sidney residents took an active role in agriculture
within the city limits. Chickens, in fact, once helped bring financial ruin to one of
Sidney’s leading industrialists, school furniture magnate John Loughlin, builder of Bonnyconnellan Castle.
Horses, of course,
were kept in town, either in commercial livery stables or in privately owned small barns
behind the houses, because they were the main driving force in front of buggies, wagons,
and other conveyances.
Where we have parking meters for our cars in Sidney, our ancestors built special
parking contraptions for their horses: The iron hitching rack around the court
year square is in process of construction. The posts, of which there are one hundred and
forty-four, are set nine feet and four inches apart. The chain is one thousand three
hundred and thirty-six feet long. The contractor, Philip
Smith, is doing a highly satisfactory job. (Shelby County Democrat, July 1,
1887)
These hitching posts, it is thought, were melted down for military use during World War
II. But, the Shelby County Historical Society has preserved two of them which will be on
display at the William A. Ross, Jr., Historical Center in Sidney.
But, horses were not the only agricultural-type animals living full-time in Sidney.
"Just about everybody had a chicken coop then," long-time Sidney resident Art
Killian has reported. Killian was 4 years old when the 1913 flood drove his family up to the second
floor of their South Miami Avenue home. "After the flood waters went down, we found a
lot of dead chickens as well as cats and dogs caught in the fences."
Cows, even pigs, had long been a problem for the city fathers. The Sidney City
Council’s deliberations in 1998 over a proposed cat ordinance only emphasize how much
worse things could be. Well over 100 years ago, the council’s predecessors wrestled
with similar ordinances, but of a larger dimension:
The cow ordinance published this week is unnecessarily severe.... It requires the
owners of cows empounded to pay the Marshal two dollars for the release of a cow, which is
double what it should be. The Marshal can well afford to take up a cow and empound her and
release her to the owner for one dollar and it will be a severe penalty for the the poor
owner of a cow to pay two dollars, near the price of two days work, to redeem his cow that
has accidentally got away from him, and become empounded (SCD, May 6, 1881).
The need for such an ordinance was longstanding. For
example, a Civil War era Sidney resident
took to the front page of the Sidney Journal (Nov. 4, 1864) to plead for the
return of his cow: "STRAYED AWAY.--A red spotted Cow. We miss her very much.
The poor old Cow, we would like to see her back again. Now if any of our friends have seen
such a Cow, wandering where she ought not, and will leave word at the JOURNAL OFFICES, we will greatly appreciate their
kindness, and will make honorable mention of the same."
Perhaps some ancestors of this stray cow
mobilized the citizens of Sidney to protect the courtsquare: "In June, 1839, a few of
the residents of public spirit, desiring to improve the appearance of the square, and
hoping to keep the stray cattle from making a resting place of the ground, took a
subscription and a contract was let at $329.25 to Samuel Mathers for fencing the
same..." (SJ, July 14, 1893).
Cows were not the only, and
certainly not the first, wandering offenders in downtown Sidney. An ordinance
directed against hogs was enacted over Mayor Samuel Mathers’ signature in 1864:
Be it enacted by the Town Council of the Incorporated Village of Sidney that
after the passage and publication of this Ordinance, it shall be unlawful for the owner or
owners of any hog or hogs, of any size or description, to allow the same to run at large
within the limits of said Incorporated Village.
The ordinance instructed the village "Marshall" to impound all such hogs and
sell them within four days at a public auction. He could charge the owner fifty cents for
each impounded animal and fifteen cents a day for taking care and feeding it (SJ,
Mar. 11, 1864).
Prominent Sidney resident and businessman W.H.C.
Goode, owner of Sidney’s American Steel Scraper Co. and builder of Whitby Place (now GreatStone Castle) in 1891, may have
been Shelby County’s preeminent farmer, with extensive farm holdings in Shelby
County, North Dakota, Texas, and Mississippi. No absentee, hands-off farm owner, Goode
never rented out his land, but rather hired farmers and directed the farm work himself,
according to his wife, the late Ida Haslup
Goode.
Mr. Goode’s inherited love of the soil and its cultivation led him to purchase
large tracts of land in various states. In 1885 he bought three sections in the Red River
valley in North Dakota. Through good years and poor years ‘"Goode Farm" has
always kept pace with its neighbors in sending to the markets of our Country its share of
the Nation’s wheat. During all these years Mr. Goode never failed once to be present
during the harvest and generally at the spring seeding. He knew and loved stock and while
busy with the factory in Sidney, he carried on for a number of years six farms in Shelby
County raising both grain and stock...(Ida Haslup Goode, booklet titled W.H.C.
Goode, of Sidney, Ohio, n.d.).
Perhaps the county’s largest farming enterprise at one
time, the Mary L. Poultry Plant, was located in Sidney, or very nearly so. Bonnyconnellan
Castle owner and Sidney’s prominent school desk manufacturer, John Loughlin, built
the huge chicken production complex just across the river on South Brooklyn Avenue
property just north of where the Big Four Bridge would be built nearly 30 years later.
"Mary L." was touted as the "largest poultry plant in the world"
when Loughlin built it near his farm residence in 1895. The residence is now the home of
Eric and Gay Smith. The horse-shoe shaped chicken house had a capacity of 21,000 birds,
while a separate egg house contained 3,000 Leghorn hens producing 200 dozen eggs daily.
Loughlin kept 900 Plymouth Rock hens for hatching eggs, some 300 a day. He reportedly
shipped 300 broilers each day (Atlas and Directory of Shelby County, Ohio,
American Atlas Co., Cleveland, 1900, pp. 106-7).
Loughlin seems to have captured the idea of
assembly-line production in Shelby County long before Henry Ford applied the concept to
the auto industry: TO
HATCH CHICKENS BY STEAM: John Loughlin will in the course of a few days begin the erection
of a monster chicken raising establishment on his farm just east of this city. In the
large field just north of his summer home, he has broken ground for the building, which
will be of brick, two stories high and roofed with slate.
Connected with the building
will be a steam plant and the chickens will be hatched in incubators, leaving the shell
the chickens will drop themselves into a place called the nursery, where they remain for a
day. From there they will be transferred by an elevator to the second floor where there
will be thirty pens so arranged that the chicks which are hatched one day will to into one
pen and those hatched the following day into the same pen, the ones hatched the previous
day being moved into the next pen, and so on until the chicks have passed automatically
through each of the thirty pens.
A large circular building built in the shape of a horse shoe, will connect the main
building with the shipping building, in which is also located the office. This circular
shaped building will be divided into sixty pens, with rooms for the chicks and so arranged
that the chicks will remain in each pen but one day. It will thus be seen that the chicks
are ninety days in making the circuit from the nursery, the day of hatching, to the
shipping room. When the plant is in running order, it is Mr. Loughlin’s intention to
hatch and ship an average of two hundred chickens each day.(SCD, Apr. 24,
1896):
Chickens were not the only product of Loughlin’s
venture; Sidney also reaped considerable amounts of tourist dollars from special
excursions starting from Cincinnati and Toledo just to see the plant:
Commencing next Sunday there will be excursions run from all points on the C., H.
and D. Railroad to the Mary L Poultry Plant in this city. Next Sunday there will be two
excursion trains on the C., H. and D., one will leave Cincinnati, at 7:15 a.m. and the
other will leave Toledo at 7:10 a.m. and both will arrive here at 10:30 a.m. Returning
they will leave Sidney at 6:20 p.m. These excursions will be increased until there will be
eight a week, four on the C., H. and D. and four on the Big Four railroad. It is expected
that a hundred and fifty thousand strangers will visit Sidney within the next four months.
There is no other attraction in America equal to this poultry plant, and our citizens
should feel proud of it and do everything in their power to encourage it and treat all the
visitors courteously. It is modestly estimated that these excursions will leave to the
citizens of Sidney at least one hundred thousand dollars (SDN, July 11, 1899).
If outsiders found Mary L. fascinating, Sidneyites were just as fascinated by the
outsiders, according to the Sidney Daily News (July 16, 1899): There
was not a very large crowd on the excursion run on the C.H.&D. railroad yesterday from
Toledo and Cincinnati to this city with the Mary L. poultry plant as the attraction. There
was, however, quite a large crowd of Sidney people at the depot to see the excursion come
in.
Crowds picked up again a couple weeks later
as the Sidney Daily reported between 500 and 600 arriving on trains in one
day from Cincinnati and Toledo (July 30, 1899). Loughlin catered to the tourists by
developing special facilities for their comfort:
The visitors visited the poultry
plant and spent a portion of the afternoon in the grove over the hill at the rear of the
plant. The grove is a most beautiful place and is provided with a large number of settees,
swings, and hammocks for the convenience of visitors (SDN, July 30, 1899).
The business, however, resulted in failure, noted Hitchcock’s 1913 History
of Shelby County. A 1963 historical series in the Sidney Daily News reported that, "In a relatively short time the plant became a quicksand in which the
entire Loughlin estate was drawn into ruin; the castle, Bonnyconnellan, located on Walnut
Avenue, was mortgaged to the German-American bank and the Mary L. soon followed."
"In later years," the SDN article continued, "with
slaughter houses barred from the city limits, the plant became a packing house, at which
nearly 4,000 hogs and 1,200 head of cattle were slaughtered annually, and where all kinds
of sausages were made and refrigerated and bacon and hams cured by the Bennett-Bulle
Packing Co."
Agriculture in Sidney persisted well into the 20th century. Hogs reportedly resided
within the Sidney corporation limits in 1924, according to the county auditor’s
office which counted nine porkers there valued at $80 (SDN, July 10, 1924).
Since then, Sidney has presented no real agricultural competition to Shelby County’s
rural areas, although the county seems to be out-competing Sidney in the number of new
housing starts.
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