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I't was like the Knott’s Berry Farm of its day, oldtimers told Doris Lee for an article she wrote in the Fullerton News Tribune 40 years ago.“In the springtime, a faraway bellowing coming from the foothills of northeast Fullerton would float down into town,” she wrote. “It was mating season on Ed Atherton’s ostrich farm and the sound of somepastoral stillness and echoed down to the city.”In August, 1886 Atherton moved 47 birds from Buena Park to near what is now Acacia Avenue and Dorothy Lane in Fullerton. Atherton, a native of South Africa, had determined the Buena Park environment was too damp for good breeding —- only six chicks were hatched in two years.The move to Fullerton, Orange Coast Magazine reported in July 1989, “... must have been the ostrich version of a honeymoon retreat... nine chicks hatched thatBy 1889, Fullerton reveled in the title of‘the ostrich capital of the continent,’ ” ac-magazine.It was the feathers. They ... (mainly the long plumes from the wings) were very valuable, as women’s hat styles dictated a plume for nearly every hat,” Atherton’s son, Dalton, wrote to Mike Welds soon after his column about the farm appeared in the News Tribune on June 28,1963.Valuable indeed — “between $60 and $65 per ‘harvest’ from each adult bird, Orange Coast magazine reported.However, Dalton Atherton wrote, the fascination with feathers died out and the business with it. His father starting “growing walnuts and oranges on some of the property, but he kept a dozen or two of the birds into the mid twenties.”—BobZiebeJI
Newspaper Details
Fullerton News Tribune
Fullerton, California, US
Thu, Aug 14, 2003
Page 3
Full Page
Clipped by
Los A.
CA, USA 01 Dec 2020
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Fullerton News Tribune
