Carla Occaso
How did Vermont farmers get their extra turkeys to the big city markets before the railroads? By foot, according to a 2016 article by Mark Bushnell titled “Then Again: Turkey drives were the 1800s version of ‘farm to table.’” In the weeks before the holidays, farmers would walk their animals — slated to be the main course on holiday tables — to Boston. Flocks could number into the hundreds or even thousands. But the numbers of birds traveling to Boston would wax and wane on the way as some turkeys stayed behind at stopping points (or by falling victim to foxes or turkey thieves), while others joined the group en route. For Montpelier farmers, it would have been a 180-mile walk at around 10 miles per day. When dusk hit, the birds would seek out a place to roost, which sometimes proved disastrous, according to another account.
Neil M. Clark wrote in his 1963 American Heritage article, “When Turkeys Walked,” of the late autumn custom that was practiced all over the U.S. from Texas to Kentucky to points north. “A Vermont-to-Boston flock once picked the roof of a schoolhouse for sleeping, and it caved in. The schoolmaster, working late inside, barely escaped alive,” Clark writes.
The turkey drive in 1824 was known to have been one of the largest in Vermont history, according to a radio piece by Peter Gilbert, former chair of Vermont Humanities, while speaking to Vermont Edition in 2014. That year, 40 homesteads banded together and followed the Connecticut River down to the shore and then to Boston. The farmers’ children acted as drovers, scattering corn to keep the turkeys moving as they went.
Many such undertakings were done on speculation — with farmers not knowing who exactly would buy their farm-raised creatures until they got there. And this was before Thanksgiving was even a holiday. Thanksgiving did not officially come into being until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The turkey-driving practice dwindled in the 1850s after the railroads came to Vermont.
