The Egg Basket Of The World

The brick hatchery building at 7th and F Streets in Petaluma, now artists' studios, is a survivor of the industry that made the town call itself the Egg Basket of the World. It was built for the Must Hatch Incubator Company, founded by Alphonse Bourke in 1898, which was hatching a million and a quarter chicks a year by 1911. The industry began with an incubator. The town's own story credits Lyman Byce with inventing it in 1879, but the newspapers and patents of the time credit a young dentist named Isaac Dias, who showed a redwood, octagonal incubator heated by a coal lamp at the district fair in 1881, applied for a patent in 1882, opened a factory in 1883 and was killed the next year, aged 28, when his shotgun went off as he climbed out of a duck-hunting boat. Byce had been his business manager. By 1902 Byce was claiming the invention as his own and running what he called the largest incubator factory in the world on Main Street. His company went bankrupt in 1919, and he lived until 1944. The hens did the rest. A 1918 promotion claimed four million Petaluma hens laying 450 million eggs a year, and that August the town staged the first National Egg Day, with a parade, a chicken barbecue and an Egg Queen, Marie Arfsten. The Chicken Pharmacy, a drugstore devoted entirely to poultry health, opened on Main Street in 1923 and made Ripley's Believe It or Not. Production peaked in 1945 at 612 million eggs. The industry collapsed in the mid-1960s under consolidation and competition from Southern California, and the last Petaluma hatchery closed in 1989. Egg Day, killed by the Depression, came back in the early 1980s as Butter and Egg Days.