Farm Chicken Coop Interior, Rural America, 1950s

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Farm Chicken Coop Interior, Rural America, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Farm Chicken Coop Interior, Rural America, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-9E9848

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Somewhere on a mid-century American farmstead, a flock of mixed-breed laying hens occupies a wood-plank coop built the way farm structures were built then — with whatever lumber was on hand, in whatever configuration kept the wind out. The nesting boxes are mounted at roost height along the back wall, which was the standard arrangement, because someone in 1910 decided that was correct and no one had questioned it since. A metal waterer sits on the floor, the kind of galvanised gravity-fed drinker that was the state of the art in backyard poultry keeping and would remain so for decades, because it worked and cost almost nothing. The south-facing windows let in the winter light that every poultry manual of the era insisted was essential to egg production, the theory being that hens needed convincing that spring had arrived in order to do their job, which is one of the more relatable positions any livestock has ever taken. The person who took this picture almost certainly kept meticulous records in a ledger — eggs per day, feed cost per bushel — because that was how a 1950s farm family measured whether forty hens were earning their keep.

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