This week’s post is somewhat unusual. A few years ago while walking in downtown Milford, where I used to work, I noticed a painting of a baby chick on the upper level and one side of an old building. After doing some checking, I was told it was once an advertisement for a baby chick hatchery in Milford. At one time there was a brick building between the Oppenheimer building and the railroad tracks on Emeline Street, just east of Main Street. The hatchery was located in that building, which is no longer there. Apparently there was an alley way underneath the building where the advertisement was about a block north of the hatchery on Main Street. The alley way is also no longer there. You can probably see both buildings are joined now. I gathered this information from posts on a Facebook page posted by those with memories of growing up in Milford. I don’t have specific dates except that the hatchery was likely in business in the 1950s. Small businesses were more likely to make it in those days before large poultry operations took over and crowded out the smaller operators. It was common back then to have much smaller operations and farmers had a little bit of everything on their farms. I am also told the baby chick will eventually be repainted in order to preserve some of Milford’s history.
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