P2 The SpokeSman • WedneSday, december 29, 2021
OFFBEAT OREGON
OSU’s world-record-breaking chicken
sparked a fowl feud with newspaper
BY FINN J.D. JOHN
For The Spokesman
October of 1913 was a tri-
umphant time for Professor
James Dryden, the poultry
specialist at Oregon State Uni-
versity (or Oregon Agricultural
College, as it was then called).
His name was in newspapers
nationwide, in glowing trib-
ute after glowing tribute to his
success.
One of his experiment-sta-
tion hens, the prosaically
named C-521 (later renamed
Lady MacDuff), had just shat-
tered the world record for egg
production with a stunning
303 eggs in a year, breaking
the 300-egg barrier for the first
time ever. The highest-pro-
ducing non-Oregon chicken,
prior to C-521’s feat, was a Ca-
nadian bird that laid 281 eggs
in 12 months. This was at a
time when the average chicken
laid 75.
There was, however, one ex-
ception to the “glowing tribute”
pattern in newspaper cover-
age of Dr. Dryden’s work. That
would be the weekly Cottage
Grove Leader.
“In our opinion, Prof.
Dryden is impracticable, out
of harmony with the coun-
try’s best and most successful
poultry breeders, is discour-
aging the great and growing
poultry industry of the state
and is therefore out of place at
the head of the Department
of Poultry Husbandry in our
great educational and experi-
mental institution, the Oregon
Agricultural College,” the Lead-
er’s editor raged, in its Oct. 28
issue. “We would suggest, in
conclusion, that he tender his
resignation.”
But the Leader’s somewhat
one-sided feud with Dr. Dryden
had been going on for several
years by then. After all, no one
does something like call for the
resignation of a world cham-
pion, in the very hour of his
triumph, on the spur of the
moment. Nor does anyone do
something like that as a solitary
voice. The Leader was speaking
for a small but influential Ore-
gon industry … an industry that
we might call Big Chicken.
James Dryden was hired at
OAC (Oregon Agricultural Col-
lege) in 1907. He’d been a poul-
try specialist at Utah State, and
had helped build the program
there; now, he was given charge
of the entire Poultry Husbandry
department, such as it was, at
University of oregon photos
Poultry professor James Dryden as he appeared in the late 1910s.
OAC.
At the college, Dryden very
quickly set about his quest to
breed a superhen. He knew
that the conventional wisdom
among chicken experts was
that egg laying was not a geneti-
cally transmitted characteristic.
Breeding experiments at other
land-grant colleges had failed to
change the chickens’ egg pro-
duction measurably.
To Dryden, this made no
sense. Some chicken breeds
regularly laid 75 to 150 eggs a
year, whereas the original wild
chicken (the jungle fowl of In-
dia) only laid a dozen or two.
Something had made leghorn
and barred-rock chickens start
laying 10 to 20 times as many
eggs as their wild ancestors, and
if that something wasn’t genet-
ics, what was it?
His theory, which he now set
out to test, was that the reason
for the failure of other experi-
menters to breed better layers
was that they had been breed-
ing for a broad array of other
attributes at the same time:
straighter tails, more symmetri-
cal combs, prettier feathers, and
so forth. He also noted that the
previous experiments had been
with purebred chickens, which
raised the possibility that in-
breeding might have caused the
resulting chicks to be less robust.
A less robust chicken will obvi-
ously lay fewer eggs.
While these experiments
were going on, Dryden started
printing regular bulletins for
chicken keepers. These were
CROSSWORD
geared toward ordinary farmers
and the few specialized poultry
ranchers then in operation, and
Dryden made no secret of his
focus: Eggs and meat.
“To encourage the poultry
industry, hundreds of poultry
shows are held each year and
thousands of dollars are paid in
premiums and all the premi-
ums are awarded on the basis
of the American Standard of
Perfection,” he told a reporter
on Nov. 9, 1910, according to
the Medford Mail Tribune’s
story. “We think we are encour-
aging the poultry industry by
paying premiums for feathers
and other fancy points and for
shape of body, and farmers go
to the shows to purchase their
breeding stock. They never sus-
pect that the premiums indicate
nothing of the egg-laying quali-
ties of the fowl.”
“I believe,” he continued, “that
the farm stock, the cross-breed
stock (or, shall I say, the mon-
grel stock) have better vitality,
are more fertile, are less preyed
upon by diseases and produce
more eggs than the average
flock of purebreds. The way to
develop the poultry industry
is to stop advocating purebred
or standard-bred fowls for the
farmer. He should decide on the
type of fowl to breed and forget
the names of the breed.”
It was these and similar re-
marks that brought upon
Dryden the enmity of Big
Chicken, and by extension
the Cottage Grove Leader. Be-
cause, of course, a number of
Lady MacDuff, who reportedly laid 300 eggs in one year.
parties were making rather
a lot of money putting on all
those poultry shows and fan-
cy-chicken contests and selling
Certified Deluxe Purebred Pre-
mium Chickens to farmers.
As far as I’ve been able to
learn, the one-sided war was
launched in the Jan. 3, 1910,
issue of the Leader. On the
top left-hand side of the front
page in that issue, under the
headline “JUDGE COLLIER
AFTER DRYDEN: Shows Up
Fallacy of OAC Bulletins on
Poultry Raising,” there ap-
pears an article that basically
claims Dryden was just trying
to get some cheap publicity —
that the OAC bulletin was the
1910s equivalent of clickbait.
The article is presented like
an interview, but the entire thing
after the first paragraph is one
enormous quote from “Judge
Collier,” a poultry breeder
named Harry Collier who
served as contest judge for the
1909 Eugene Poultry Show.
“Men will do almost anything
in order to get their names in
the papers,” Collier said. “Actors
have been known to ‘kick’ their
wives in order that they might
get a front-page story, and I sup-
pose we poultrymen are some-
times guilty of the same fault.”
He then goes on to say that
there are so many wonder-
ful kinds of chicken available,
there’s no reason to have cross-
breeds or mongrel chickens,
and that only a fool would take
such a chance.
“Where a man has a ‘dung-
hill’ flock of birds, it would
help his flock to cross them
with a purebred male, but I
cannot see the advantage of
crossing purebred fowls,” he
scoffed. “The man who advo-
cates crossing purebreds is a
poor man to advise farmers.
… The farmer has got the ad-
vantage of the chicken fanci-
er’s work. He can now buy any
kind of fowl that he desires
and he is very foolish to try and
cross-breed the purebred when
he can buy now any kind of fowl
he wants.”
“The Judge” then finished
SUDOKU
off with some remarkably con-
descending advice for the edi-
fication of those ignorant col-
lege-boy meddlers: “If OAC
wants to do something for the
farmer, let them impress him
with the fact that he wants
to build better houses for his
poultry … Let them study the
mortality in fowl life here in
Oregon and teach the farmer
how to prevent roup and kin-
dred diseases. There is lots
to be done. This trying to get
notoriety by attacking some
well-known principle is fool-
ish in the extreme. It makes the
college the laughingstock of
those who know better and at
the same time makes the poul-
trymen treat anything coming
from the college with indiffer-
ence or contempt.”
Thus spake Big Chicken!
Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State
University and writes about odd tidbits of
Oregon history. His book, Heroes and Ras-
cals of Old Oregon, was recently published
by Ouragan House Publishers. To contact
him or suggest a topic: finn@offbeatore-
gon.com or 541-357-2222.
WEATHER
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