When Zeeland shipped ten million baby chicks a year

For a few decades, the most reliable sound in Zeeland was the peeping of newly hatched chicks waiting on the mail. The town didn’t raise full-grown chickens so much as start them — incubating eggs by the millions and shipping the day-old chicks off in ventilated boxes to farms all across the Midwest and beyond.

The trade started small, the way these things do, with farmers buying mail-order incubators in the early 1900s and discovering they could sell more chicks than their neighbors could hatch. By the 1920s and into the 1950s it had become an industry. Forty-some hatcheries clustered in and around Zeeland, and in a good year they shipped something like ten million chicks. A town of a few thousand people had quietly turned itself into one of the great chick-mailing centers of the country, the post office handling crates that arrived alive and left alive.

It made sense while it lasted and then it didn’t. Chicks need warmth, and warmth in a Michigan winter costs money — for heat, for feed, for everything. Operations drifted south where the math was kinder, and one by one the Zeeland hatcheries closed. The peeping faded out.

One outlasted them all. Townline started in 1913 as a cow farm run by Jacob and Ada Geerlings, switched to poultry as the chick boom took off, and is still going under the fourth generation of the same family — the last working chicken hatchery left in Zeeland. They still mail live chicks to your door in spring, boxes of them, exactly the way the whole town once did. If you’ve ever ordered backyard hens and felt the box pulse with sound when it arrives, that’s a Zeeland tradition more than a century old, hanging on by one family.