I’ve always had a possible answer to the age-old question, Why did the chicken cross the road? I’m sure it was to get away from my Grandma. In those days before there were chicken processing plants and packaged chicken parts in grocery stores, there was Grandma and her form of poultry processing. She would choose a fat hen from amongst the flock that wandered about over the back yard. She could easily spot one who hadn’t yet managed to figure out how to cross the road. With one flick of her wrist, she would deftly wring that chicken’s neck. And the next thing we knew, a big pot of chicken and dumplings would be simmering on the “wood” cook stove. My, oh my.
I thought of all this when I saw the metal sculptures that flank the East Marietta Street entrance to the future home of History Cherokee, formerly known as Cherokee County Historical Society. One of the figures is a very big chicken representing the county’s thriving, decades-long poultry processing industry. A little research reveals that it’s been almost a century since presidential hopeful Herbert Hoover campaigned with a promise for “a chicken in every pot,” a dream that never materialized as the Great Depression was ushered in instead. Better times followed once the Depression and the Second World War passed. Here in the County, folks had begun to raise chickens and ship them out. Chicken houses sprang up all over the landscape, and soon chicken processing plants, feed mills, hatcheries, and even egg “farms” would put us on billboards and maps as “The World’s Largest Broiler Producing County” or “The Poultry Capital of the World.”
In Rebecca Johnston’s book, “Cherokee County, Georgia, A History,” she lists many names and businesses in the section devoted to the poultry industry. There is one name that has special meaning to me. During the years that we lived in Canton, we came to know the Carl and Hazel Reinhardt Hill family. I never really understood what Carl did for a living, but they all seemed to be quite happy, well-fed, sheltered in a nice home, and as normal as a household with three teenage sons could be. I learned later that Carl had invented some kind of mechanism that had something to do with chicken gizzards. I do recall talk of his being nominated for a Nobel Prize in some nerdy category for that endeavor, and we had fun teasing Hazel about what she would wear to Oslo. (It never happened.) Eventually, their youngest son, Jerald, married our youngest daughter, Sarah. Carl had died, but over the years his legacy has survived. And surprisingly, even today, there are new stories. This latest one gives added confirmation to the phrase, “It’s a small world.” When I asked Jerald for some background, he refreshed my memory. “When Dad got out of the Army, he went through six weeks of training in refrigeration and welding. That gave him the skill set he needed to go to work at the Etowah Poultry in Canton as maintenance man. Most everything was done by hand at that point. The difficult job of cutting open gizzards and pulling the skin off was causing yet unnamed carpal tunnel syndrome in the workers. They were losing feeling in their thumbs. So Dad felt like there must be a way to maximize that process and reduce the difficult labor.” And the rest, as they say, is history. One thing led to another as he invented and patented the “gizzard peeler” and other different machines including automatic fillet equipment to remove the bones from chicken thighs and wings.
Fast forward to now, with some background. Many years ago, our niece, Sheila, married a guy named Andy. We sometimes saw them at family gatherings, but over the past few years we have seen them more often. Lately, there have been opportunities for Jerald and Andy to get better acquainted, and in one conversation Jerald shared a bit of Carl’s story with Andy who had his own story. In 1975 he took a class about patents at the University of North Carolina in Raleigh. One day the professor, a patent attorney, ended his lecture by inviting questions from students. One student asked, “What was the most interesting patent you ever worked on?” The professor then went into great detail about a machine that split chicken gizzards, invented by someone with a 3rd grade education. He gave a precise description of the way the machine worked, and almost 50 years later, Andy related that description to Jerald.
It is, no doubt, a small world. And, thanks to Carl, a better world. I imagine that every culture on the globe embraces chicken recipes. The future is bright … for everybody but the chicken. And the past history shines brightly also, a rich and interesting heritage well represented by our own Big Chicken at History Cherokee’s new museum. Watch for the grand opening.
Columnist Juanita Hughes is retired head of the Woodstock public library and a local historian.
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