On this date in 1929, the Happy Chick Hatchery in Grafton was setting up shop in North Dakota. The Happy Chick Hatchery was set to sell baby chicks and different types of feed. It was located next to Kittelson's garage in the Thomas Olson building.
The building was completely remodeled, though there were portions still to be fixed up. There were also plans to build a warehouse in the rear of the building for storage, and to complete a red and white checkerboard pattern on the front of the building.
It was a startup business that could ought to be especially useful to the agrarian work so important to the state. So they were ready for lots of business. They selected, they said, the best eggs and began to advertise the health and prosperity of their baby chicks. As part of their campaign, they took out an ad in the local papers, which read: "March--and still another chick has pipped the shell. One in thousands--just ordinary, cheeping chick, but we are going to single it out. We are going to let it speak for itself."
The ad continued in the first person voice of a baby chick. The chick said it had two important figures in her life--her mother hen, and, "Mrs. Jones, our owner." The advertisement noted that the animals at Happy Chick Hatchery were fed the store's Purina feed, which had "everything in it that little chicks need for bone, flesh, and feathers," and that “us” chicks were encouraged to eat as much as “we” could at the request of “our” mother It was protection against the poor feed that was to blame for the death of so many young chicks.
The ad must have worked. By the end of March, after just a few weeks of being open, the hatchery was processing orders for 23,000 baby chicks. They had requests already set into the summer, according to manager A. J. Borsheim. These orders were from all parts of the northwest, though the majority of the orders were from farmers and institutions near Grafton.
Borsheim said, "We are manufacturers of baby chicks," and that this would be the company slogan. We don’t know how happy the chicks were, but the farmers seemed to go for Happy Chick Hatchery.
Dakota Datebook by Sarah Walker
Sources:
Grafton News and Views, March 27, 1929, p1
Grafton News and Views, March 13, 1929
