Oakhurst’s chicken lady

More than half a century before Decatur Realtor Stacy Reno’s 2011 meltdown on Twitter and in local blogs over her backyard chickens, goats, and turkeys, another Decatur woman provided neighbors a necessary fowl service. “I think she was the only one in our neighborhood that would actually wring their necks and sometimes they would bring her one and ask her to kill it for them,” recalled Betty Barrett Small of her mother, Annie Elo Barrett’s skill at killing neighborhood chickens.

Turn of the 20th century urban chickens being kept on the grounds of the U.S. Soldiers’ Home in Washington, D.C. Credit: National Archives and Records Administration.

The Barretts lived in a 1920s-vintage home on McKoy Street in what is now Decatur, Georgia’s, Oakhurst neighborhood. Back then, that part of South Decatur didn’t have an official name. Residents simply referred to their street names for orienting visitors or to describe the neighborhood to outsiders. Before 1936, when James and Annie Elo Barrett bought their home, the property had been occupied by renters. The 0.034-acre lot where the Barretts and their children moved was one of only five developed parcels along McKoy Street between Pharr Road and Spring Street. Their first neighbors were a telephone company operator, a bank clerk, an office clerk, and a mechanic.

Their daughter, Betty, recalled how the suburban yard was adapted to accommodate her mother’s chickens. “My uncle had come out and fixed her a big chicken lot and we had two big trees and that big chicken lot,” Small explained in a June 2012 interview. She added,

She didn’t have one chicken; she had them all across that back, three-fourths of the way across that back was fenced in for chickens and she had a big chicken house, And they laid eggs and she would kill them and dress them and I remember wringing their necks and them flopping all over the yard. And she would get a bunch of – my uncle would bring her baby chicks and she had an incubator thing that she could bring into the kitchen and keep them in in the wintertime till they got big enough to put outside.

Elo Barrett’s chickens — she preferred to be called Elo rather than Annie — were the talk of the neighborhood. The Barrett children, Betty, her older brother Hiram, and younger brother James Jr. adopted their mother’s chickens. “We always made a pet out of every group she ever had,” said Small. “Chickens make a good pet. They’d follow you around like a puppy dog.”

After World War II ended, new brick ranch houses sprang up along the east side of McKoy Street and neighboring Spring and Adams streets. Young veterans and their families moved into the neighborhood. Hardy Luke was an Army vet who bought a McKoy Street ranch house in 1947.

Hardy and Elizabeth Luke’s 1947 brick ranch house. Photo by author, June 2012.

Luke worked as a buyer for Lockheed. Nearby kin influenced Hardy and Elizabeth’s decision to move to McKoy Street. “My husband’s brother and his wife had bought a house two streets over from us on McDonough, right in Decatur there,” recalled Elizabeth Luke. “We decided to see what they had out there were he was and he called and told us that they were building these two new houses on this little dirt road. It was not paved.”

Like many postwar suburban homebuyers, Hardy Luke had a long commute by car. Several of his coworkers also bought nearby homes in South Decatur and East Atlanta and they formed carpools to share the commuting costs. “They took turns with it a week at a time,” said Elizabeth Luke. She fondly recalls the two decades they lived on McKoy Street. And, Elo Barrett’s chickens are still vivid in her memory.

“Jackie’s [James Barrett Jr.] mother used to kill chickens for us,” said Luke, 90, in a June 2012 interview. “She’d wring their necks in our backyard because none of us – we young people didn’t know how to kill chickens.”

Annie Elo Barrett and her son, James, standing along McKoy Street. The Luke’s brick ranch house is in the background. Photo courtesy of James Barrett.

Neighbors like the Lukes would buy live chickens at local markets and bring them home. Elo Barrett helped her new suburban neighbors out when it came time to slaughter the birds for meals. “We’d get a live chicken and she would come kill it for us and wring its neck,” Luke recalled.

One of Luke’s favorite stories is how a good deed by her husband created a population explosion of live chickens in the neighborhood. “One year my husband decided that he was going to give all the children in the neighborhood colored chickens for Easter,” said Luke. “It used to be that at Easter everybody, even the grocery stores, sold little colored chickens. Pink and blue and yellow and green. Little baby chicks.”

After explaining about the Easter tradition, Luke then recounted what happened after all the kids got their chicks:

So my husband went to the store and he bought little baby chicks for everybody in the neighborhood. All the little children. I think there were about thirty of them, something like that. Twenty-five or thirty.

And we had another neighbor that lived two doors down from us who was a nurse at Scottish Rite hospital and her husband was superintendant of baggage. Now that was his title, for the Greyhound Bus Company in downtown Atlanta. Jack King. And they had two sons. Well of course they were recipients of two of the chickens, also.

And so it went along and the chickens got bigger and we took some crates and built some little chicken houses out in the backyards and our next-door neighbors, Louie Kennedy, the director down at Rich’s down there built one too to put his two girls’ and his son, the chicken house back there. It finally just got to be a little bit too much, if you can imagine.

I had five children then so five big chickens walking around my backyard. So we decided one day during the summer when the children were all down at the swimming pool or something. I don’t know, they weren’t home, anyhow. Bertha King came down and she Ms. Barrett got the chickens all together and they took them to Bertha’s brother’s and unknown to any of the children – and I’ll tell you the honest truth and my children will tell you, too – my children did not know it until I was living in this house and I’ve been here eleven years. And one of my daughters said, “We ate our baby chickens?” She’s in her sixties now and she was horrified. They killed those chickens, brought them home, fried them up, and we had a picnic that summer that we claimed was for the street but it wasn’t. It was to get rid of the chickens. And we ate the baby chickens who were grown – we said that Bertha took them to her brother because he had a farm down in the country and he was going to take care of them.

After divorcing James in 1943, Annie Elo Barrett raised her three children in her McKoy Street home. She died in 1963 at age 64 and her estate was divided among her three children. They sold the house in 1966. By 2012, the intangible neighborhood memories are all that remain of Barrett’s chickens.

Elizabeth Luke and her husband Hardy, who died in 1975, lived on McKoy Street until 1966. Her memory of life in postwar Decatur is sharp and richly textured. She lives with a daughter and she has remained close to James Barrett Jr., the boy everyone called “Jackie” and who played ball in the vacant lot where the home she and Hardy bought in 1947 was built.

James “Jackie” Barrett in his McKoy Street backyard c. 1956. Photo courtesy of James Barrett.

© 2012 D.S. Rotenstein, Betty Barrett Small, James Barrett, and Elizabeth Luke. This post was derived from research done on behalf of a Decatur homeowner. Permission to reproduce or quote from this post must be obtained in advance.

The author would like to thank the homeowner, Barrett family members, and Elizabeth Luke for permission to use the interviews and historic photos in this post.

 

One thought on “Oakhurst’s chicken lady

  1. this is a great posting! I’m an historian writing a book about the suburbs of Atlanta, and I’m really interested in stories like this, about suburban chickens. Might you be willing to share the transcripts of your interviews? or, perhaps put in a nice word for me to your interviewees, and get me permission and contact info to reach out to them myself?

    Thanks for your good work!
    Chris

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