'Just Ducky' In Westhampton Beach

There once was a time when “East End” and “ducks” were practically synonymous.

Despite the poultry industry’s long-standing history here, which boomed for about a century until the 1980s from East Moriches to Westhampton, there has never been a centralized record that it ever existed—until now.

Last weekend, the Westhampton Beach Historical Society unveiled “Just Ducky,” the area’s debut exhibit on the history of local duck farming, at the Tuthill House Museum.

And this exhibit is just the beginning, according to Westhampton Beach Historical Society President Bob Murray.

“What we’re preserving here is the start, and we hope to expand it,” Mr. Murray said during a recent interview at the museum.

“We’re the initiators of it, but long term, we hope it will become a town-wide project,” added Southampton Town Planning Director David Wilcox, standing next to fellow organizer Lauren Barlow. “That’s our goal.”

“The real people are the farmers,” Mr. Murray continued. “And before they all die off, we’ve gotta get their stories. This is fast fading.”

Over the last year, the organizers have collected historical industry specimens, photographs and countless anecdotes from four of the major duck farming families on the East End: the Massey, Tuttle, Hallock/Culver and Wilcox clans.

“This was the duck capital of the world,” Mr. Wilcox said, noting that at its peak in the early 1960s, Long Island farms—the vast majority on the East End—hatched 7.5 million chicks. “It truly was. These were the largest poultry farms in the world, and the most profitable.”

“It’s amazing,” Ms. Barlow, who descends from the Hallock family, mused. “You could be a millionaire on ducks.”

The famous Long Island Pekin ducks first arrived in New York thanks to self-declared “duck fancier” James Palmer and New York merchant Ed McGrath, who hatched 25 duck eggs in 1873 in Peking, China, and asked Mr. Palmer to bring the chicks back to the United States.

Four months later, the nine surviving Pekin ducks landed in New York. Five went to the Palmer family as payment and McGrath took the remaining four—three females and one male—to Connecticut for breeding.

“Somehow, in the next few years, they made it out to the Island here,” Ms. Barlow said. “They found out, once they saw the Pekin ducks, that this particular duck was larger and had a greater number of eggs. It was just the best type of duck.”

But they weren’t necessarily easy to raise, Ms. Barlow explained. Pekin ducks are exceptionally poor mothers, she said. While prodigious at laying eggs, they didn’t have the follow-through of sitting on them to hatch. To work around this, the Hallocks employed chickens to roost.

“But interestingly enough, the chickens would get up a week too early because they must somehow know timing,” Ms. Barlow laughed. “So when they were done, the farmers would have to get other ones to sit on them. Two rounds of chickens every time.”

As technology advanced with kerosene and electrical incubators, the chickens lost their jobs on the farm. After all, one incubator alone could hold as many as 30,000 eggs. Also, as the feed improved, the three months needed to raise a duck shortened to just five weeks.

Once the chicks hatched, they were moved to a barn called a hot brooder—a small, confined area with a source of heat. When they got a little bigger, they were placed in a cold brooder. Before they could go outside, the ducks needed to turn from yellow to white, Mr. Wilcox explained, and then they were allowed to swim.

The farmers didn’t need to worry about the ducks flying away, simply because they could barely get off the ground, the organizers explained. But for that reason, predators—raccoons, possums and minks—were a huge concern.

“They were always raiding the duck pens at night and killing the weaker ones,” Mr. Wilcox said.

“Mink. You know what they like to eat?” Mr. Murray asked. “Duck tongue. So that poor duck couldn’t quack.”

“I heard they were very easily frightened, ducks,” Ms. Barlow said. The farmers learned to keep the lights on. Otherwise, the ducks would “panic in the dark and smother each other. Fear was their worst enemy.”

Once the ducks were full-grown to about 5 pounds, they were killed and plucked by “pickers.” Many were women who came to the United States during the immigration wave of the 1930s and ’40s. They were paid 5 cents per duck, and the good ones could “pick” up to 60 a day.

Some even got husbands out of the job.

“This one duck picker put her name on a tag around the duck’s neck when it went to market after she picked it,” Mr. Wilcox said. “Someone in New York City, who bought the duck, found the tag, came out to Eastport to find her and ended up marrying her.”

The number of duck farms reached its height in the 1930s, when 90 of them lined the area’s waterways from East Moriches to Westhampton. On one Eastport creek alone, there were once five farms, Mr. Murray said.

“These farms got built on the prime real estate in the early 1900s,” Mr. Wilcox said. “My cousin actually said, had it not been for the duck farms, that Westhampton would have been developed years before Southampton became the popular place. But they had to wait for the duck farms to move out.”

East Enders would have been waiting a long time. The number of farms may have declined in the 1940s, but duck production only increased. In 1960, C&R Duck Farm in Westhampton was the largest hatchery in the world, Ms. Barlow said. At that time, there were 7.5 million ducks hatched on Long Island, and C&R Duck Farm had 3 million of them.

But by the late 1980s, all but a few duck farms had shut down.

“Paul Massey, he’s the last guy out there, in my book—at least in the area covered by the Historical Society,” Mr. Murray said. “They’re almost all gone.”

“Still, many, many people have a connection to the duck industry,” Mr. Wilcox said. “And we’re reaching out to everyone who has stories.”

“Just Ducky,” an exhibition detailing the history of local duck farming from East Moriches to Westhampton, will remain on view through September at the Westhampton Beach Historical Society’s Tuthill House Museum. Hours are Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Admission is free, but donations are appreciated. For more information, visit whbhistorical.org.