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Circa 1931: A farmer driving his flock of turkeys down a road to market. Photo: Getty

Thanksgiving turkey trot: before refrigerators, turkeys were marched to market

  • Once upon a time, your Thanksgiving turkey took a very long walk to get to your table
  • The practice began in England in the mid-17th century
Thanksgiving

In the days before refrigeration, livestock trucks and a highway transport system that criss-crossed America, the only way to get turkeys to market for the holidays was to march the birds, like condemned men, to the nearest slaughterhouse.

These long journeys were called turkey drives, similar to the cattle drives romanticised in film and literature, but without the cowboys, the Wild West myths or the threat of a stampede from 500-kilogram steers. There was no romance in driving these unruly beasts, trying to keep them from wandering off into neighbouring flocks or falling prey to coyotes and other predators.

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“As impractical as they may sound today, turkey drives were a common sense solution to a major problem: how to get the surplus of farm-raised turkeys in Vermont to the mass market of Boston,” wrote historian Mark Bushnell in Hidden History of Vermont.

“In the days before trains, slaughtering them and shipping them on ice wasn’t an option,” Bushnell continues. “So, the turkeys had to arrive alive at the market. The only way to get them there en masse was to make them walk.”

A wild turkey strutting in a field. Photo: Alamy

Turkey drives can trace their history to England, where the first reference to the practice dates to the mid-17th century. In a footnote to his book, The Turkey: An American Story, author Andrew F. Smith unearthed a report from the Battle of Dunbar in 1650, in which an observer noted that Oliver Cromwell marched his 5,100 Scottish prisoners “like turkeys” down the road.

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Turkey farming had become an important commercial business in 17th-century England, Smith wrote. Most of the turkey farms, however, were in East Anglia on the eastern side of the country, far from London, the primary market.

“While touring England in 1724, the English novelist Daniel Defoe, famous for Robinson Crusoe, observed that turkeys filled the roads from East Anglia to London in the autumn,” Smith wrote. “The journey took a week, and in one season as many as three hundred droves passed over a single Stratford Bridge. Defoe noted that droves contained from three hundred to a thousand birds each, so he estimated that between ninety and three hundred thousand birds crossed that one bridge in a single year.”

Driving turkeys was a common practice across the United States, too. From Vermont to Ohio to Texas to California, turkey drives were a familiar sight in autumn. The trick was to drive the animals without losing too many along the way – and without the birds losing too much weight during the trek, which could be 30 miles (48 kilometres) Or more.

Roasted turkey for Thanksgiving. Photo: Alamy

To keep the turkeys plump – and to encourage them to march – farmers would load a covered wagon with feed. The workers (called “drovers”) who guided the birds would scatter feed along the path to keep the turkeys motivated over the long march. Aside from predators and an occasional poacher who would try to steal a bird for his own dinner table, farmers had to be mindful of covered bridges.

In The Turkey , Smith quotes from a 1964 novel, The Great Turkey Drive by Charles Morrow Wilson, who wrote that when the turkeys entered a covered bridge, the birds mistook the darkness for nightfall and would promptly fall asleep halfway across the bridge.

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“The solution that Wilson’s drovers found was to carry hundreds of birds, one at a time, across the bridge and into the sunlight,” Smith wrote. “Sometimes, the drovers carried lanterns, Wilson explained, to try to trick the birds into walking a few extra minutes each day.”

Dusk was the enemy of all turkey drivers. As soon as the sun set, the birds would stop walking and start roosting.

“When the shades of evening had reached a certain degree of density, suddenly the whole drove with one accord rose from the road and sought a perch in the neighbouring trees,” Smith wrote. “The experienced drover just drew up his wagon beside the road, where he passed the night.”

The turkey trot is a thing of the past now. Photo: Alamy

The vast majority of these drives were practical and transactional, just a routine part of being a turkey farmer during the era. But Cuero, a town in southeast Texas, would take drives to a new level. Cuero was already home to a processing plant, which attracted ranchers and farmers from around the area, but in 1912, some entrepreneurial-minded townspeople decided to turn the annual march of turkeys into a tourist attraction. They dubbed it the Turkey Trot, after a dance craze of the period.

The 1912 Turkey Trot attracted 30,000 sightseers, who watched a reported 18,000 birds parade down the main street. The Texas governor attended. The turkeys were followed by turkey-related floats and prominent groups, such as the local Scouts.

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Cuero would host Turkey Trots, off and on, for decades until the early 1970s, each one a spectacle in itself. For each event, a secret society selected a “sultan” and “sultana”, the Trot’s version of a king and queen, who wore lavish kaftans or gomleks to channel the dress of the Ottoman Empire. (This early 20th-century equation, Turkey Trot equals Ottoman Turks, would not fly today.) There was even a sumptuous coronation.

“Sultans were men of high distinction and success, and tradition held that sultanas were college-aged women of local pedigree,” intoned a narrator in the 2007 documentary, Ruby’s Town about Cuero. “The royals ruled the fictional land of Turkeydom.”

So what killed the Turkey Trot in 1970s? Industrialisation. The broad-breasted white, a turkey bred with an abnormally large breast, had become the preferred bird on American tables. The problem for Cuero is that the bird is so big and so top-heavy, it can barely walk – let alone trot.

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