104 THE AMERICAN BREEDS OF POULTRY 



and who grew ijoultry for market purposes and bred strong, vigor- 

 ous, early-maturing stock. Spaulding had all sorts of barn yard 

 fowls, and a friend told Upham of the dominique colored ones in 

 the fall of 1866, and Upham had gone to see them. 



Spaulding had crossed the year before, according to Upham's own 

 account, published in Poultry Argus, Polo, Illinois, May, 1874, 



A fine, large, old-fashioned havvk-co'.ored cock to very large Black Cochin 

 hens, witn legs heavily featnered, producing many black pullets and a few black 

 and white pulicts, some with legs Clear from featliers, others more or less feathered; 

 but the cockerels were invariably steel grey in color, a few without feathers on 

 legs, many of them heavily feathered, with body plumage very handsome. I selected 

 the best trio, to my idea of what I wanted to produce, and bred from them, and 

 one-half or more of tile chicks were anything but what I wanted to breed from; 

 many of the ]iullets came black, a few were black and white, very handsomely marked 

 and legs minus feathers; but the cockerels invariably came steel grey in color, 

 with fine single combs, some of them free from feathers on legs, but the majority 

 of them heavily feathered on their legs. 



Spaulding had only bred the birds a year when Upham made his 

 original purchase. Each of the three birds that comprised his original 

 trio had been produced by Spaulding from "a cross between a large 

 common hawk-colored, single comb dunghill cock with pure Black 

 Cochin hens." The trio as purchased by Upham had feathers on the 

 shanks, indicating unmistakably their Asiatic blood. Mr. Upham then 

 bred the trio, and the stock produced satisfactory results; most of the 

 chicks were of the desired color in both sexes, there were some black 

 pullets as he relates, but he was able to select both cockerels and 

 pullets with shanks which were yellow in color and reasonably free 

 from feathers. 



Upham introduced additional Asiatic blood into his strain, and 

 in three years between 1871 and 1874, he made such progress in 

 breeding the variety true to "feather and points" that, in 1874, he wrote 

 that he was able to get "a greater number of fine exhibition birds 

 from a clutch of eggs than from any other variety I ever bred." How- 

 ever, from his first Spaulding purchase he bred birds of such a quality 

 as enabled him to make his historic exhibit at Worcester, 1869, where 

 the new variety created such a sensation that he took orders for one 

 hundred sittings of eggs for hatching at the then remunerative price 

 of $2 a sitting. At Worcester, Upham sold a trio to C. Carol Loring, 

 a man who remained well known in poultry breeding circles well up 

 into the twentieth century. This Loring purchase was the source of 

 Mark Pitman's original stock, a breeder who was soon to become 

 prominent in the variety. 



Early constructive breeders. Pitman was one of the first great 

 improvers of the breed. He was perhaps the first breeder to look at 

 the individual feathers on a Barred Plymouth Rock and not accept 

 the color pattern as a whole. As a result of analyzing the plumage, 

 he saw the value of contrast between the light and dark bars. 



Pitman, at his home in Salem, Mass.. developed a flock of Plym- 

 outh Rocks known as the Essex Country Strain, and the birds of 



