How Petaluma became the ‘World’s Egg Basket’

How did Petaluma become the “World’s Egg Basket”?

Petaluma had several advantages other communities lacked.

It had the waterways necessary to transport eggs in the pre-automobile age. It had innovators in poultry technology. And it won the marketing race hands down, thanks to promoters like Lyman Byce and Bert Kerrigan.

Petalumans did a modest egg business right from the start of the Gold Rush. Every farm had chickens, and every farm sold excess eggs for pin money. No one thought of chickens as an “industry.” The idea of a farm just to raise chickens didn’t exist.

But technology was catching up with old ideas about chicken farming.

When hens laid eggs, they took three weeks to hatch; then another five to 10 weeks to grow up, before the hen was ready to lay again. The hen was the bottleneck in the chicken life cycle.

Isaac Dias, a dentist and inventor, was working on a device to speed up the whole process: the incubator. Separating the eggs to be hatched from the hen encouraged her to keep laying.

Dias was an inventor, but not a marketer. Enter Lyman Byce, a Canadian medical student and former chicken farmer who had come to Petaluma for his health. He had been tinkering with the incubator idea since childhood. Sometime after he met Dias over a toothache, he and the dentist developed a temperature-controlled incubator.

It’s debatable whether Byce or Dias did most of the inventing. In any case, it was Byce’s marketing strategy that put the Petaluma Incubator Company in the public eye and Petaluma eggs on the world map.

By 1879, Byce was touring with his machine, showing it at fairs. It was a sensation. People lined up to buy the newly hatched chicks as souvenirs. Lest interest fade, Byce began hatching ostrich eggs, hummingbird eggs, even alligator eggs. Once, he opened the incubator before a crowd to reveal a newborn baby.

An early customer was Christopher Nisson, a Danish immigrant who was casting about for a more efficient way to raise chickens. The incubator was so successful that Nisson began hatching eggs for other farmers.

This was the start of the Pioneer Hatchery, the nation’s first, heralding a whole new way of raising chickens. Petaluma was now shipping not just eggs and chickens to market, but baby chicks to ranches all over the country.

Nisson was perhaps the first rancher to go “all chicken,” with the region’s largest commercial operation. His other improvements included a mechanical “brooder” as a hen substitute for the chick’s first three weeks.

He created the “colony house,” a small, typically 8-by-12-foot floorless hut on skids. Rather than clean out the droppings from the hens, he could simply drag the house to a new location. Rows of these colony houses dotted turn-of-the-century chicken farms, and one is on display at the Petaluma Museum.

These new technologies greatly increased the output of every chicken farm. At last Petaluma was able to meet the growing demand for eggs.

By 1917, Petaluma was shipping 16 million dozens of eggs. The Corliss Ranch, with 50,000 chickens, was then the world’s largest. Petaluma eggs were served to the president of the United States and the king of England.

But with the arrival of railroads and trucks, egg transport no longer depended exclusively on the Petaluma River. Output had reached a plateau.

In 1918 the city fathers hired a marketing genius named H.W. “Bert” Kerrigan to create a new business strategy for the town. After some months of research, Kerrigan announced that all that was needed was a little promotion of Petaluma’s strong suit: chickens.

And promotion was what Kerrigan delivered. He issued pamphlets and press releases extolling Petaluma’s flavorful and health-giving eggs and calling for the first ever National Egg Day on Aug. 31.

For the Egg Day Parade, he created a 5-by-15-foot basket full of eggs and displayed it in San Francisco to publicize the city’s new nickname: “The World’s Egg Basket.” Egg Day became a big tourist draw and received national attention.

Reporters came to film egg farms and left with rapturous descriptions of the promised land for would-be chicken ranchers.

As flocks grew in size and density, so did the threat of communicable diseases. In 1923, the nation’s first “chicken pharmacy” was opened at Washington and Main streets to deal with chicken complaints.

About this time a new immigrant group was coalescing in Petaluma: Jewish chicken farmers.

They joined Sam Melnick, who had settled here in 1904 and quickly grew his flock to 16,000 chickens. Word spread, and one by one, more than 200 Jewish families arrived. Most spoke Yiddish and had never farmed before, but the existing community helped them become successful.

Descendants of yesterday’s chicken ranchers are among today’s community leaders.

What put an end to Petaluma’s status as the world’s egg basket?

New technology in chicken housing resulted in vast houses with hundreds of thousands of chickens in wire cages, and mechanized feeding and egg collection. No family farmer could afford such a setup.

Furthermore, Petaluma’s ideal climate and sandy soil were irrelevant when chickens lived indoors and never touched the ground. Chickens could be as easily — and more cheaply — raised in Arkansas or Southern California.

Other factors were the decline in egg consumption and the rise in property values, as more and more families moved to the suburbs.

If there’s a future for chicken farming in Petaluma, perhaps it lies with small chicken and produce farms that now cater to people who are willing to pay extra for locally grown free-range chickens and their eggs.

(Contact Bonnie Allen at argus@arguscourier.com)