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In the pre-dawn hours of a Saturday morning in 1937, 24-year-old Victor Weaver and his wife, Edith, loaded 17 dressed chickens into the trunk of their 1936 Hudson Terraplane. They had prepared the chickens the prior afternoon in their small farmhouse kitchen in Blue Ball, Pennsylvania.
They took their cargo to the Sharon Hill Farmers Market, near Philadelphia. They returned to Blue Ball with an empty trunk, a little bit of cash and plans for weekly runs to Sharon Hill.
In the short space of a few months, the husband-and-wife team was processing 200 chickens a week for their blossoming business. They had outgrown the farmhouse, so they moved to nearby New Holland and hired an employee, Ben Burkholder, to help dress the birds and tend the market stand.