by Cornelius Weygandt
Sadly, most of the good works on Dominiques are no longer commonly available and of those, most are only a few paragraphs in length. Many of the older poultry papers carried articles about Dominiques and these remain the best source of reading material. Foremost among those papers were: The Poultry World, Reliable Poultry Journal and the Poultry Tribune. You are encouraged to seek out copies of thes and other older works while they might still be obtained.
The following article was written by Cornelius Weygandt for the 1914 issue of Dominique Doings, the official publication of the National American Dominique Club. An expanded version of this story appears in Mr. Weygandt's 1932 book, A Passing America.
A Dominique Pastoral
by Cornelius Weygandt
Never the word "Dominique" falls on my ear but it conjures up images and recalls old memories. It conjures up images of the hill farm in Chester County where my mother was born. I see the old stone house, its white-washed walls dimming in the November twilight but white enough to still afford relieve to the shapes of fowls perched high up in the Sheldon pear tree in its dooryard. Dominiques, of course! How clearly I see them who never saw them at all. And the wind that buffeted them that, too, I hear; and the cold of the night falling I feel so often have I been told the story of those staunch birds. Aunt Rachel told me of them thirty odd years ago on winter evenings when the wind was up, and today Uncle Jim, who alone is left now of those who knew that flock, tells me of them, taxing my creduality with his stories of good egg yield even with so exposed a roost. It was not his chore to chase them into the barn shed, either, but that of his brother Pliny, who ! loved the Dominiques so that he stayed on in the country with them for two years after the rest of the family left Uwchlan for Philadelphia.
"Dominique" conjures up, too, bright springs of boyhood when I made pilgrimages with Uncle Pliny, then forty years older than the lad of the Pennsylvania hill farm, out the Limekiln pike from Germantown to "Yerke"s" for Dominique eggs. It brings back, too, my staid expeditions these years of middle age to "Yerke's" or "Darlington's" for egg of the "Pennsylvania strain", or my small boy's rushing in with crise of "A Dominique by express" and the going out to the barn with a lantern to find a smart cockerel of Carter's none the worse for his long journey from New England.
How wide the Dominiques ranged that summer they went with us to the White Mountains! I can see that pert pullet, now a matron of two years and my best hen, running sandpiperlike along the rushing torrents of Cold Brook, catching I know not what insects, or grasshoppering back into the lush grass of Intervale. Most often, however, when you say "Dominique" to me, I think of my dozen of them in the open front shed at home here on the Wissahickon Hills. Open to the full sweep of the north wind though their yard is they sing away and lay the winter through, pert slips of pullets and spruce biddies of three years, one and
all living their lives with zest and paying their way with bonus on bonus to their admiring owner.
Much as they delight me in the yard, however, they delight me more among the sere weeds and ruddy grasses of the waste land that a kindly neighbor allows them to frequent. The brown-red background brings out the beauty of their blue-gray. Almost equally well I like them later in the year, when I let them loose on the lawn where one may better see them, alert and spruce and trim, their cuckoo feathering in relief against the gree. They are indeed the birds for these surroundings, Colonial birds, in harmony with the remodelled Pennsylvania farm-house in whose shadow they pick and strut. Dominiques belong to it as belong the box-bushes and weepin willow, the Catherine pear and the Mazzard cherries.
This and other interesting stories may be found in The American Dominique.