People from the Past: The Chicken Wagon Man

 The following information appears in a self-published book by former Raymond resident, David A. Sorrell, called “As I Remember.” The book features Mr. Sorrell’s recollections about the early days of Raymond. The stories appeared in a weekly column in The Raymond News from 1963-1972. 

Dear old Newt Scott. I wish that I could set down on this paper just how I remember him. Newt started out to be a schoolteacher; I suppose his growing family made him try to find something that would better help him to support his family. Thirty to fifty dollars a month for teaching school about seven or eight months a year was hard to get along on. So, Newt became the driver of the “chicken wagon,” or rather one of the drivers for the G.M.D.  Legg Poultry Company. This was the company that had bought the old I.J. Lawler building and turned it into a place where chickens were picked, eggs were candled, crated, and shipped, and feathers were stored and sent off a few times each year in great burlap sacks. They also dumped the fine butter bought from the farmers’ wives indiscriminately into big fifty gallon barrels and sent it away someplace to be rechurned and sold in the big cities.

Now, a chicken wagon driver was quite a personage to the farmers’ wives along his route. To him was sold the surplus young fryers, mostly young roosters. The best looking young hens were saved to produce eggs and so on. He would buy all the eggs and butter the farmers’ wives had to sell. The chicken wagon had a regular day to come. What did a chicken wagon look like? Well, it was just about a four-storied chicken coop on wheels. There was railing around the top to hold on the cases of eggs that the chicken wagon man bought as he covered his route. Also, here were the butter firkins into which was dumped the butter that was bought. Sometimes in muddy weather, it took four mules to drag the chicken wagon on around its route. I think that perhaps Newt Scott was an ideal chicken wagon man. He was polite, he always joked with the women, if they liked to joke, he was a shrewd buyer for his company, he could figure quickly just how much so many pounds of chicken came to or how much so many dozen eggs would be, all in all Newt was an ideal chicken wagon man. Now, I suppose he would be called our poultry, egg, and butter buyer, but to the farmwomen he was just the chicken man who came every Thursday and brought the little cash money that was scarce in the lives of these hard-working women.

Newt’s tiny blonde wife was a dear little soul and she gave Newt three babies. Again memory is hazy and I cannot think of but one’s name and that was Herschel. An incident stands out here. It was haying time and I was working for Frankie Bowles out east of town driving the horse to the hayfork. This was before Newt began his career as a “chicken wagon man”. He was working there during his summer vacation helping Frankie get his Timothy hay up. It was Saturday night and the week’s work was over and Frankie and Newt and his small boy were driving back to Raymond for the weekend. That is, Newt and I were going home for the weekend and Frankie was driving us in. It was a beautiful summer evening and as we drove along the country lane that led us by the old Blue Mound Church, the Henry Hitchings place high up there on the mound to the right, and the Frank Brandes place on another mound to our left, we are going into the sunset and Newt began to sing a song about “Going Down the Mountain into the Sunset.” I suppose Newt was happy about going home to see his wife and babies and the song just bubbled up out of his happiness at this good prospect. A good memory and even now I hum the tune of this old song at times and somehow this little scene of so long ago comes into my mind.