When I was going to school at Pea Ridge in the late 1940s and early 1950s, I often used to look across the street “over in town” and wonder what my Granddad Scott Nichols might be doing at Webb’s Hatchery. Granddad worked for the hatchery for several years after leaving the farm about 1945 or 1946, about the time I started to school. It may be strange, but I always felt like I had an interest in Webb’s Hatchery, first because my Granddad worked there, and also because we sold hatching eggs there to be hatched as broiler chicks.
As I am recalling the late 1940s, our country was coming out of two great crisis events, the Great Depression and World War II, both of which had had an enormous economic and personal impact on everyone. Benton County and the Pea Ridge area had also gradually lost a great source of family farm income as the apple industry declined during the 1920s and 1930s. Our farm families were needing and looking for something to help them make a better living. My own Nichols family, which had a long tradition of being “orchard people” in Washington County and in east Benton County, were by the late 1920s beginning to look for something better. My Granddad Scott Nichols and Grandma Ellen Nichols brought the family to Pea Ridge in about 1928, leaving behind their apple orchards in the Brightwater-Garfi eld area. My Dad Russell Nichols and my Uncle Gene Nichols continued to drive back to Garfield to school,where my Dad graduated from Garfield High School in 1933, and Uncle Gene in about 1936. Granddad made the move, hoping to raise hogs to pay o◊the new Pea Ridge farm. He also kept a moderate-sized fl ock of laying hens.
As it all turned out, the hogs for the market idea didn’t work out too well, partly because of disease problems with the hogs, just as pests and diseases had plagued the later years of the apple industry. But the family made it pretty well, farming with a combination of milk cows, fl ocks of chickens, a few hogs, and a couple of teams of horses. As I am recalling, the 1940s saw considerable growth in the poultry flocks in our area, with broiler raising coming to the fore as a major source of farm income. I always had the feeling that Webb’s Feed and Seed and Webb’s Hatchery of Pea Ridge were major players in expanding the poultry industry in northwest Arkansas.
We never became broiler growers ourselves, and my Dad would move deeper into dairying in the mid-1950s, but we did participate in the poultry industry as providers of hatching eggs. I have forgotten some of the breeds of chickens that we used to keep. Often the hens were of one breed and the roosters were another, producing a hybrid chick that was considered better as a broiler. I remember how we used to always be checking for and trying to avoid diseases among the chickens, especially lung ailments that could kill hundreds of birds.
During the summers, our growing pullets were kept in a summer house with chickenwire walls, across the creek from our house.
I remember that Fred McKinney and my Granddad would come out to our farm to do blood tests on all our pullets. I wasn’t particularly good at catching chickens, but it was often my job to catch all the chickens and bring them to the Webb’s Hatchery men for testing. It was real work, but I felt kind of important doing it.
I am hard put to name names, but I know there were many dozens of other farms like ours who through the years supplied hatching eggs to Webb’s Hatchery. Some of the broiler growers who come to mind are Floyd Henson, Ray Patterson, Arlo Campand Pete Patterson. There were many more, of course.
I was never aware through the years that Webbs also became a major player in the turkey industry. But Fred McKinney tells me about their working with a Kansas City fi rm to obtain hatching eggs to produce a wide-breasted turkey breed which became very popular on the market. As years have passed, the poultry industry has tended to concentrate more and more under large companies such as Tysons of Springdale, or Petersons of Decatur, and smaller operations such as Garretts of Rogers, or Farmers Coop have disappeared.
After Webb’s Hatchery closed in the 1990s, the hatchery building was sold, and remodeled to serve as a nice restaurant. For several years Carmella’s Restaurant provided attractive meals in downtown Pea Ridge. Maybe something like that could happen again.
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Editor’s note: Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is an award-winning columnist, a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society. He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.
Community, Pages 5 on 09/04/2013