Vineyard Turkey Farm: Elisha Smith

This post was contributed by Linsey Lee and The Martha's Vineyard Museum

I worked at the Turkey Farm on the Vineyard Haven Edgartown Road. It was up where Hillside Village is now, that whole area. It went all the way back clear up to the woods up practically the Old Sailors’ Burying Ground over there. It was maybe thirty acres.
At the Turkey Farm, they raised a lot of turkeys, about twenty thousand turkeys some years they had there. There was a lot of them sold here on the Island. But we shipped a lot of them off; I’m not sure what percentage it would have been, but a lot of them.
They hatched their own eggs and they had hatches coming off about every week from March or April on. The newly hatched chicks they’d be put in what they call a battery where you could control the heat and the feed to them and the water until they got to be, oh, two weeks old. Then they were moved into pens, about a hundred in a pen. You had to put wires in the corners, because any noise would spook them and they’d all pile up in the corner and the ones underneath would suffocate. They’d be there for maybe a month, then they’d move to different pens, a little bit bigger pens. They get moved at least three times from the day they’re hatched. Then they go outdoors on what we called the range, where they had roosts and shelters and big feeders for them. You go out there with a ton or two ton of grain every day to feed them, there used to be so many of them. They had whole fields to roam. We planted a lot of grasses, rape, and anything green for them to eat. Clean a field up they would. They love green stuff, you know.
It was all fenced around to keep the dogs out, a high fence, too. Chicken-wire fence, it was heavy stuff, but once in a while a dog would dig under and get in there and kill fifty, seventy-five of them.
There were a lot of buildings. Let’s see, there was what they called the killing house there, where they had the big tanks, the freezers, and the cooling place. The turkeys were driven in there, where they were picked up and killed and defeathered and cooled off and they put them in the freezers there. Then there was another house where they kept the older hens that laid the eggs and the toms there. There was a barn up there on the hilliest part of it there where all the hatching was done, where the batteries were and the brooder house for the small turkeys. There must have been five or six buildings, long buildings, a hundred foot or more long.
That house that’s still there, that was the family house and that small building, set alongside it, was like a retail building where they sold turkeys and smoked turkeys and roasted turkeys and turkey pies and everything that went with a turkey. It was open most of the summer, fall, and after Christmas it was closed up until May probably.
Steady, there were probably five or six people working there all the time. Then when you were picking the turkeys around Thanksgiving and Christmas you’d have four or five others, most anybody you could get. Some old-timers, they’d come in and only work a few hours, stuff like that, you know. It took a lot of help to get all that done. Sometimes we could do a thousand a day, birds. There was a good bunch of fellows working here, always joking and carrying on all the time.
I did some of the killing. Sometimes I was a picker. We traded jobs so it wouldn’t be so monotonous, you know? You’d go pick the turkeys. That was easygoing, pin-feathering them. Then you’d go back to catching them and then you’d bring in the machine to electrocute them.
They had an electrocuter that you put their feet in and then turned them up and stuck their head in this little jaws like that held it and then you pushed the knife through their brain. It electrocuted them and when you pulled the knife back they relaxed because there was no more juice there. Then you could pull the wing feathers or tail feathers very easily. Then they got hung on a track and they went around through the scalder. When they dropped off the other side of the scalder, a fellow would pick them off the track and put them on the picker to get all the feathers off. The majority of the feathers came off that way. Then he hung them on a rack and different people did what they call pinfeathering and cleaning them up. Then they threw them in a big tank of ice water to cool them down fast. Then when we’d get done at night we’d haul them all out of there and hang them on racks and push them in the cooler. Sometimes you’d come back at night and clean them. They’d take the innards out and get them ready -- pull the tendons in the legs, get them ready to sell.
We’d have orders from different big companies in New York that would take five hundred or a thousand turkeys. They’d give you a list: they wanted so many ten and twelve pounders, fifteen pounders, or twenty pounders. So you’d package them in crates after they’d been all dressed, ready for the oven. Then they would get shipped off to New York.
The fellow that started it was a fellow name of Oscar Burke. He had a home on Water Street in Edgartown, a summer home. Park Avenue in the wintertime. That was in 1938, I guess, he started it, one of them years right along then. I started working for him in ’41, ’42. He did up until, oh, ’45 ’46 and then he finally sold it to Joe Bettencourt. Then he sold it to George Schwab. Then George Schwab was chasing dogs or something, and he climbed over a back fence up there with his gun and somehow or other the trigger got caught and it killed him, climbing the fence. That was just before Thanksgiving time, so everybody around went up and helped his widow there get the turkeys all dressed off and ready to ship and whatever had to be done with them. We spent a lot of time helping her out. That was the end of the Turkey Farm then.

Voices from Vineyard Voices — Words,
Faces and Voices of Island People
and the Vineyard Oral History Center
at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum

Interview by Linsey Lee

From:
Elisha Smith b. 1923
Oak Bluffs
Farmer, Chairman, Conservation District of Dukes County
President, M.V. Agricultural Society, Director and long time member of the Rotary Club

photo credit: Linsey Lee