Farm animals an issue in Arlington Hts. since the 1870s

Our town has wrestled with the issue of farm animals within the village limits longer than Captain Ahab wrestled with Moby Dick.

In early August, the village board unanimously agreed that chicks and ducks and geese better scurry because the local constabulary is after them, although, admittedly, not in a surrey with the fringe on top.

Peacocks and potbellied pigs also need beware the local ordinance. So what is new about this chicken issue? It seems written into our town history.

In 1876, there were 1,200 people in town, and many of them were fresh off farms, but there was still some question which of their farm animals would be welcome in their burgeoning village.

The locals considered themselves well situated, listing 40 businesses in their town, including “four hotels, two elevators, three churches, eight stores, one carriage factory, one flour mill, two cheese factories, two lumber yards, one sash-and-blind factory, one windmill and one threshing machine manufacturer.”

There were also five parks and a schoolhouse that cost $10,000.

But they still had that livestock issue. As R.B. Mitchell noted in his Arlington Heights Gazette and Real Estate Bulletin of July 4, 1876, “McNab refuses to give any land to widen the street on his north line, but he pastures his cow on the 40-foot street that Mr. Dunton laid out.”

McNab’s cow was not the only critter to flout ordinances. Editor Mitchell tells of Mr. Bigsby’s thoroughbred cock “which gives him a great deal of trouble. Lath, nails, and boards are no terror to him, as he succeeds in breaking through them every day and strutting away where he pleases.”

Mr. Bigsby “attached a ball and chain to (the cock’s) leg and says that if that doesn’t answer he shall banish him to the Dry Tortugas.”

Actually, in 1876 there was more leeway for farm animals in spite of complaints about cocks like Mr. Bigsby’s and a cow pastured on a village street.

Ads for $100 dollar lots (taxes 18 cents a year) in Mr. Mitchell’s Gazette featured the promise of not being at “the mercy of the rent collector” and come-ons like raising your own vegetables, keeping your own cow and making your own butter and cheese. We know lots of people had chickens at the time as well as cows.

The headline on the current Daily Herald story simply says that pigs and peacocks are not welcome. For those who skim the paper and don’t read past the headlines, that statement might suggest that there are more chapters to come to the chickens-in-Arlington story. We can live with that so long as we don’t have a Moby Dick-Captain Ahab ending in our future.