Straight From The Hart

  “A Tale Of Two Families”. Our story starts when three different Bennett families migrated here in the mid to late 1840’s from Virginia and Kentucky through Illinois down to Missouri. About the same time the Brice family migrated to Missouri from Illinois, in search of land which the U.S. Government was selling to settlers for $1.25 an acre. James Brice camped beside a clear stream of water that flowed from a large deep spring and eventually emptied into the Niangua River. He filed a claim with the government for the 160 acres on which the spring was located and kept buying land as money became available until he owned all the land through which the stream flowed on its way to the Niangua. He planted many different crops and built a mill on the stream between the spring and the site of the present day dam. In the late 1840’s Peter Bennett, Sr. and his family settled in the same valley but on the other side of the Niangua River. Peter purchased from the government the land that is

  In the 50 years since 1970, the world’s population has doubled while the number of chickens we eat has increased nearly 7-fold, from   11 billion to 74 billion . So, why do we eat so much chicken? According to the  National Chicken Council , it started with a mistake in 1923. Like many rural Americans, Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware kept a small flock of chickens as a source of eggs. The chickens would eventually become food once their egg-laying days were over. However, one day the local chicken hatchery  accidently delivered 500 birds , 10 times more than Steele had ordered. Apparently, a clerk had written 500 on the order instead of 50. To give you a sense of the size of the mistake, in the early 1900’s the largest farms only had  ~300 chickens . Clearly, Steele didn’t need that many eggs so she decided to raise the chickens for meat. Less than five months later, she sold them for a huge profit. Eureka! A new business was born. Steele’s husband quit his job to help with an