Weekend Economists Thanksgiving Leftovers November 29-30, 2014

[Demeter]

15. LEFTOVER TURKEYS

Thanksgiving Travel? Vermont Turkeys Used To Walk To Boston



During traditional turkey drives to Boston, children of Vermont farmers typically walked with the turkeys, scattering food to lure them forward -- but perhaps they would have appreciated wagon rides.

..."Turkey drives" were an autumnal tradition from the 1800s to the early 1900s, and involved the overland strolling of flocks of turkeys from all corners of Vermont to their destination — and demise — in Boston.

"We're talking about thousands of turkeys in each trip ... Up to 10,000," Peter Gilbert, chair of the Vermont Humanities Council, tells Vermont Edition. "One of the largest drives in the fall of 1824 involved 40 homesteads ... They went all the way from northern Vermont and the Canadian border by a variety of routes, through Ferrisburgh in the west, down the Connecticut River in the east."

THOSE CONNECTICUT RIVER TURKEYS MUST HAVE BEEN GOING FOR NYC...

Farmers' children often acted as drovers, scattering cracked corn in the turkeys' path to coax them along the route. And the route wasn't always smooth:

"Remember, in 1824 the roads were not very good," Gilbert says. "Sometimes they were just paths, sometimes they made their way across fields. Sometimes they had wagons, but this was a primitive and challenging trip."

The going was slow, Gilbert says — just 10 to 12 miles a day — and not without casualties. "They lost a lot of turkeys on the way — maybe 10 percent of them were drowned in river crossings or taken by foxes or died of natural causes. And one of the natural causes would be ... farmers’ families. As the turkeys walked by the farm, a couple of them might lose their way into a pot in the farm family’s kitchen."

MORE HISTORICAL GLIMPSES AT LINK