Thanksgiving Special: What Made The Turkey Trot To Boston?
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I'm Jane Lindholm, and this is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public Radio. If you live in the United States, you probably celebrate Thanksgiving every year. Maybe you're on a trip to your grandparents' or your friend's house right now as you listen to this podcast.

The traditional Maine dish at Thanksgiving is a turkey. At my family Thanksgiving this year, we're going to have a turkey that my uncle in Maine raised and butchered himself. It was the only one that didn't get eaten by a fox.

But a lot of people get their turkeys not at the farm where it was raised, but at the supermarket. That turkey may have been frozen and shipped to the store from many thousands of miles away in a big refrigerated truck. But back before trucks and before refrigeration, the turkeys still had to get from the farm to the big city. So how did they do it? Well, in some cases, they walked.

Today on this special episode of the podcast, we're going to listen to a story about how turkeys used to get from farms in Vermont to markets and dinner tables all the way in Boston, a couple hundred miles away. We got this amazing story from a guy named Peter Gilbert, and it originally aired on another show I host for Vermont Public Radio called Vermont Edition.

Peter says this annual event, the Turkey Drive, was a pretty amazing sight. Picture turkeys basically just taking over the roadways. Well, we're talking about thousands in each trip. It depends on the year. Some were 7,000, up to 10,000. About 1,000 was the smallest number that made such a long trip worthwhile to pay for the expenses. What were the expenses?

Well, you had to have drovers along with you to urge the turkeys along the way to throw cracked corn in front of them so they would walk forward. You had to have people riding in the wagons to carry the supplies, the corn and supplies for the people who went along the way, women, men. It was a large enterprise. And this was really well-suited to child labor?

It would be part of any farm. Farm families always had farm children involved in the work of the farm. And these were several different farms that would come together to do a communal drive, right? I mean, it's not 7,000 turkeys on one farm like you might see in some states today. That's right.

That's right. One of the largest drives in the fall of 1824 involved 40 homesteads. Other times, a person would come by in advance, purchase turkeys from different farmers, and on the appointed day would walk by, pick up the turkeys, and head south.

I rushed to say that you were not alive for these turkey drives in the early 1800s. Nonetheless, can you paint a picture for us of what it might have looked like to have thousands of turkeys walking to Boston? Were they actually on roads?

Well, sometimes they were on roads, but remember in 1824 the roads were not very good. Sometimes they were just paths. Sometimes they made their way across fields. They didn't have wagons along the way, but this was a primitive and challenging trip that far. They went all the way from northern Vermont, from the Canadian border, from Highgate to

from Island Pond. So you had large groups of people urging these turkeys along, kids throwing food in front of them to get them to walk forward. They would ebb and flow. Sometimes they'd be just a couple feet wide, but sometimes 50 yards wide in the chaos of travel. The problem with turkeys is they stop walking when they think it's dusk, and there's nothing you can do about it.

Wherever they are when the sun sets, that's where they perch.

for the night and their collective weight shatters trees. Occasionally birds end up perching on a farmer's shed or barn and the building collapses. In fact, in one town they roosted on top of the school building and the school collapsed. That was in Burke. They went through covered bridges and sometimes when they go through the covered bridge they would mistake the shade of the bridge for dusk and simply stop.

And so the drovers would have to go in there and pick them up and carry them through the bridge into the sun where they'd perk up again. There's a record in southern Vermont reporting how they clogged a covered bridge for two days, how they stopped in the middle of the road on two dark gray November days in the middle of the road and stopped traffic there. He was a guy from western Massachusetts named Father John O'Shean.

And in 1840, he records that he bumped into a large flocks of Vermont turkeys.

He was headed north in his surrey towards Brattleboro, and he met a turkey drive headed south. The turkeys began to roost on his surrey and on the backs of his horses, and so he had to drive for dear life, apparently, to get out of there. But he still ended up with a good coating of turkey guano all over himself and his surrey and his horses.

Let me just break in here to explain a couple of those words if you've never heard them before. A surrey is an old-fashioned wagon. The time period we're talking about here is more than 100 years ago, before there were any or very many cars on the roads. So people often traveled in horse-drawn wagons. And the turkeys traveled by foot. You also heard Peter use the word guano. That's another name for bird and bat poop.

I think actually it's really only seabirds and bats and maybe seals whose poop can technically be called guano. But Peter was probably just trying to be polite. Anyway, now you can picture Father John O'Shean in his surrey with turkeys surrounding him and landing and roosting on his wagon and him getting covered in turkey droppings. Ew.

Okay, so these turkeys would spend a week or two traveling from farms in Vermont all the way to Boston. That's a couple hundred miles.

They could only go 10 to 12 miles a day. And so it was a big process. They lost a lot of turkeys on the way. Maybe 10% of them were drowned in river crossings, taken by foxes, died of natural causes there. And one of the natural causes would be farmers, farmers' families. As they walked by the farm, they just might die.

a couple of them might lose their way into the pot in that farm family's kitchen. And remember, it's November. It's a sketchy time in Vermont. Sometimes they dipped the turkey's feet in warm tar. It didn't hurt, apparently, but it protected the turkey's feet from the frozen ground, from the rough terrain. Maybe it gave them even better traction on icy days. I don't know.

This to me, I mean, if it happened today, I think we'd all be out to see the big turkey drive because it would be such an unusual sight and somewhat amusing and maybe alarming. Maybe we would just want to make sure we kept them off our barns and garages. But was this something that people looked forward to seeing in the 1800s or was this such a part of normal life that it didn't really raise any eyebrows?

Well, because it was just an annual, autumnal event, I think it was something of a special occasion. You have traffic through small towns very rarely, and this must have been kind of an exciting enterprise to be part of, an exciting parade, as it were, going through your little town. But it was apparently fairly common. Around Vermont, they went from many different communities, and it was part of normal life.

They were only annual because in those days turkeys were not eaten throughout the year. They were mainly eaten for Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner. And that's the principal reason why they went down towards Boston in the fall. Why did the turkey drives end?

Mostly because of the coming of railroads to Vermont in the 1850s. First just plain old railroad cars, but then refrigerated boxcars. Also adding to their demise was the rise of steamboat traffic on Lake Champlain. But nevertheless, they continued through the 19th century and some into the early part of the 20th century.

Peter Gilbert is the head of the Vermont Humanities Council. Can you imagine running into flocks of thousands of turkeys on your trip to family and friends this Thanksgiving?

That interview originally aired on Vermont Edition. It's a daily news program for Vermont Public Radio where we cover all facets of life in Vermont. Thanks very much to the show for letting us use it. We love getting history questions from you guys, but you don't send us all that many. So if you've got a question about history that's nagging at you, have an adult help you record it on a smartphone and send it our way.

Be sure to include your first name, where you live, and how old you are, and then send it to questions at butwhykids.org. But Why is produced by Melody Beaudet and me, Jane Lindholm, for Vermont Public Radio. Our theme music is by Luke Reynolds.

This was a special episode for the Thanksgiving holiday. You can also listen to our regular episode, which is all about food. Do animals taste the same way we do? And why do some of us like vegetables while others don't? Check out our food episode to find out.

I just want to say, as so many of us think about ways to give thanks this week, Melody and I are really thankful for all of you. We love making this show, and we are grateful that you not only take the time to listen, but that you share your curiosity and creativity with us. You continue to amaze, surprise, energize, and encourage us. Thank you, and please keep asking questions. ♪

From PR.