Today, Wichitans typically buy their Thanksgiving turkeys at the supermarket.
But in the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of locals would drive out to a turkey farm on North Hillside, commune with the farm’s gobbling waddlers, then pick out the bird they wanted to invite over for Thanksgiving dinner.
Thompson Turkey Farm at 4260 N. Hillside is still remembered by many today, mainly because postcard collectors can still find cards that feature a picture of the farm taken by Azim Studios, likely between 1960 and 1965. The Wichita-Sedgwick County Historical Museum used to share the postcard’s image — which showed a woman in a red coat surrounded by hundreds of white feathered, red-wattled turkeys — on its Facebook page every Thanksgiving.
Jesse and Edna Thompson bought their Wichita farm in 1909, shortly after they were married. In the early 1930s, Edna started raising turkeys as a hobby and would sell them for Christmas money. Then, in the mid 1940s, the Thompsons made turkeys the focus of their farm, where they also had cattle and hogs and grew farm grain and alfalfa. They bought a couple of thousand head of poults, added a brooder house to their property, and quickly found themselves running a family business that processed and sold thousands of birds a year…