by Lisa Robinson
Sitting atop a redwood stump is young Bill Irwin and his Uncle Herman. Herman Irwin and his father David S. Irwin owned the land on which was once the Grover Mill. Their home was the former cook house for the mill.
At the beginning of the 1900s the Irwins blasted around one hundred redwood stumps on the property to make way for an orchard. They built a carriage house style barn for their horse and cow. Upstairs was a hay loft in which they stored the hay grown on the ranch. In 1904, they started a chicken ranch. They were not alone – at the beginning of the 20th century chicken farms boomed in Santa Cruz County.
Charles Howard established a farm of Rhode Island Reds on Love Creek. He owned a bird that was exhibited at the St. Louis Worlds Fair in 1904. David D. Bowman of the Ben Lomond Kader Idris Farm supplied fertilized eggs for hatching English Game Bantams and Mammoth Pekin Ducks. The Mountain Echo newspaper boasted, “There is no better climate for the poultry business.”
One of the largest chicken ranches in the Valley was the La Torre Chicken Ranch on Fern Avenue off Two Bar Road. Vito La Torre and his wife opened the ranch in 1948. At its height the ranch had an annual flock of 80,000 and sold as many as 12,000 chickens per week. Chicken farming led to chicken freezing and then to prepared gourmet foods featuring chicken, veal, and seafood with wild-rice, almond, and apple stuffing. According to the Santa Cruz Sentinel it was the first freezing plant in the County and for many years the largest.
In 1958, the La Torres’ tried to open a 40-acre hog and chicken ranch on Bear Creek Road, but this was fiercely opposed by residents who claimed it would devalue their properties and damage the tourist industry.
When the plant was sold in 1974 to a line of frozen foods called Weight-A-Way, a line of meals with just 500 calories each for weight watchers was added.
Another large poultry farm was Jerome Simkins’ turkey farm on Pine Flat Road, Bonny Doon. “Acres and Acres of Drumsticks and White Meat” touted a Santa Cruz Sentinel article in 1951 describing the 10,000 turkeys raised on the 58-acre farm. Initially, he raised the turkeys for meat, keeping 2,000 hens for breeding and for eggs. But by the 1970s he was only producing fertilized eggs to sell to other turkey farms. The farm then had 4,200 egg laying hens and 450 toms for semen production for the weekly artificial insemination, which resulted in around 3,000 eggs per day! In 1984, during an outbreak of a highly contagious strain of avian influenza, the flock was ordered to be destroyed.
A rather bizarre incident occurred in 1979 when 10-20,000 turkey eggs were left at the San Andreas dump off Highway 1. The pile of eggs was five feet high and ten feet long. The eggs were apparently left to rot, but the hot weather instead caused them to hatch and thousands of baby turkeys perished.
Visit the San Lorenzo Valley Museum’s new exhibition “Harvesting Our Heritage,” based on the book by the Santa Cruz Heritage Food Project. In bite sized stories, this exhibition tells the history of some of the produce grown and harvested in the San Lorenzo Valley.