Original and Restored Outhouse

The Society soon realized that the Complex was incomplete since there was no poultry house.  In 1923, an Ocean View farm wife, Cecile Steele ordered 50 biddies to replace her stock of layers for her egg sales. In an error, she was sent 500 baby chicks instead. Cecile raised the brood, selling the more than 300 surviving chicks for 62 cents a pound. Cecile was smart enough and enterprising enough to realize that she could make much more profit selling the chickens instead of their eggs. She asked her husband Wilmer to build her a chicken house and she ordered 1,000 biddies the next year. Soon the Steele’s were raising thousands of broilers, and Ocean View became the “broiler chicken capital” of the United States. Chicken houses began to appear throughout the Town and surrounding areas, and feed companies, bag companies, crate companies, vaccinating companies, and shipping companies sprang up, helping insulate Sussex County from the 1929 stock market crash and global depression.