07 Sep 2009

Lost Capitol Hill: Chicken Coops

Photo: Anne Sherwood

Photo: Anne Sherwood

There has been a lot of interest in the trend  of keeping backyard chickens of late, with numerous articles on the subject appearing in papers around the country — and even here on the Hill. There are also websites and a trade  magazine devoted to the subject. For many people, it is a reminder of an earlier age, when their grandparents would have chickens scratching around the yard to produce the morning egg or the Sunday dinner.

Sadly, it appears that DC law does not look at all kindly on this kind of urban agriculture, but let’s us leave that for a moment and cast our eyes back a century, when having chickens was an important part of living in DC.

Follow me over the jump  for a few vignettes in the history of chickens in our nation’s capital.

Browsing through  old newspapers online through the Library of Congress site is always a treat, especially when searching for such terms as ‘chicken coop.’  The number of stories thus uncovered is remarkable, though most simply detail the loss of chickens from a coop.  The following article,  headlined “A Match and a Chicken Coop” that was printed in the August 19, 1903 Washington Times is a bit different:

Morgan Massey, who lives at 2019 Eleventh Street northwest, threw a lighted match into his chicken coop yesterday afternoon. He then had to turn in a fire alarm. He escaped with slight damage.

The article unfortunately does not answer the question of why Mr. Massey threw a match into his chicken coop.

Even the White House got in on the action. An article from December 1902 describes the President’s Christmas turkeys as currently residing in the White House chicken coop.

A Capitol Henhouse? The Old Capitol Prison (From Library of Congress)

A Capitol Henhouse? The Old Capitol Prison (From Library of Congress)

I found no articles which referred to Capitol Hill chicken coops, but a recent Hill Rag article leaves no doubt that they lived here, as well. I did find a letter that a European traveler to Washington in 1867 wrote, which describes a different kind of Capitol Hill chicken coop:

[M]y European sentiment, with its reverence for tradition, has been pained by the deserted state of the old Capitol, which echoed the first infant oratory of the Union. No trace of the legislative halls remains; they were last used to confine prisoners of war. The little that is left of the buildings is now used as a henhouse.

The unnamed writer is referring to the Temporary Capitol, which was an old boarding-house that was refitted for use by Congress while the Capitol was being rebuilt following the War of 1812. It was eventually torn down to make way for the new Supreme Court building, but that is all a story for another week.

Full disclosure: The chicken in front of a capitol that  welcomes you to this story was in fact photographed in front of the state capitol in Madison, WI.

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One response to “Lost Capitol Hill: Chicken Coops”

  1. Tim Krepp says:

    I love the two tags this story has:
    “chickens” and “history”

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