When Castro Valley counted hens

Castro Valley once had about 800,000 hens and 5,000 people, if the old joke is right.

The Mercury News put it this way in 2011: “Historical accounts joke that the town had 800,000 hens and 5,000 people in 1925.” The bird behind it was the White Leghorn, captioned in one local history as the “King of the Valley,” and from a distance the chicken farms looked like “a field of white dots (hens).”

Some 12 hatcheries lined Castro Valley Boulevard. Chicks went out packed 100 to a divided box, able to travel “without food or water for 48 hours,” and they were “shipped all over the world.” The Tri City Voice says the town was “once considered by many to be the chicken capital of the world.”

Then the war ended. As the same paper tells it, “the post-war suburban boom saw most of the farms transformed into residential neighborhoods.” The hatcheries and the long chicken houses are gone.

Some things still come home to roost, though. Every fall the leaves settle on the roofs and in the gutters of the homes that replaced the farms, and the first big rain finds out how clear they are. If you’d rather not be the one up there scratching around, we’ll be glad to do it for you 😉 Sunshine Gutters and Roofing – Let us shine on your rainy day.