A recent sighting of a chicken making its way through the Rockefeller Quadrangle harkened back to the early days of the school when news of the students’ poultry projects headlined LOG articles. In 1916, fifteen boys raised a total of 900 chickens on the school farm. Today’s Loomis Chaffee hens live just a bit north of their poultry predecessors.

When the school opened in 1914, it offered three courses of study to boys: a college preparatory course, a business course and an agricultural course. The latter was intended to “prepare boys for advanced work in the agricultural colleges” as well as give students the necessary experience to step into “some intelligent work in [agriculture] on an approved and tested scientific basis.”

This curriculum included a course on husbandry of swine, bees and poultry. Each student built his own poultry house, purchased eggs, hatched them with the help of the school’s incubators and raised laying hens and roosters. Most boys kept white Leghorns but a handful of Rhode Island Reds and Plymouth Rocks could be found in the poultry houses too. The students received direction from the farm superintendent and prepared for recitations on topical readings and “exchanges of individual experiences” in the classroom. Each kept financial records detailing their costs, time spent working on their project and money made through the sale of eggs.

Annual poultry exhibits became popular social events. For the 1916 show, tickets were sold “in all parts of the town” and Gwendolen Sedgwick Batchelder, wife of Headmaster Batchelder, “tastefully” decorated the building. A piano was carried into the room and “around it chosen members of the school orchestra…pour[ed] out their souls in ragtime during the evening” as long lines of visitors viewed the birds displayed along each side of the room. Jewett Flagg ’20 won an award that year for having one of the “most perfect roosters” and Percy Snelgrove ’19 displayed a bird so fine that the judge noted it “might take a prize at Madison Square Garden”. Nearly 200 people attended the show the next year and took in a stereopticon lecture on poultry breeds, a performance by the school orchestra and the display of Elinor, the school’s remarkable cow which had “produced three daughters and an average of twenty quarts of milk daily” during the previous two years.

And one runaway rooster made news too. Henry “Hez” Joy ’18 reported to the LOG that his pet rooster “Old Sol” made a break for it in the “dead of night” as it went looking for grain “in a neighboring yard”. Stories of poultry escapades never failed to interest campus audiences, just as they continue to do so today.