Freeda in her coop at the Children’s Barn at Maymont (Photo courtesy Maymont)
Twenty years ago this month, Richmonders were transfixed by the saga of a condemned prisoner who escaped execution and for weeks hid out on a median strip in the middle of the Downtown Expressway, evading recapture and becoming a symbol of courage and perseverance against overwhelming odds.
This is the tale of Richmond’s Expressway Chicken.
The story began quietly in late February 2001. A truck rumbled down the Downtown Expressway, piled high with crates full of chickens headed to the slaughterhouse. Somehow a chicken tumbled from one of the crates. Somehow she avoided being struck by the traffic that rushed by on all sides, and somehow scrambled to a large, lozenge-shaped median covered in grass and tall, dense bushes.
On that island of green she found refuge.
Did she watch in mingled horror and relief as the truck carrying her comrades drove on, leaving her behind? Not likely. She was a chicken.
That first day became night, then dawn. Another night. Another day. Days became weeks. The weather that spring was balmy, luckily for the chicken — days in the 60s and 70s.
Meanwhile, cars roared past by the thousands. Commuters began spotting a chicken (a chicken?) on the large median near the Sheppard Street underpass. With her white feathers and bobbing gait, she stood out against the brambly bushes.
In March 2001, a couple of those commuters contacted Style Weekly, where I worked as an editor. The callers expressed amazement. They worried about the brave little bird. So much traffic! What could she find to eat?
Style published a story based on these eyewitness reports. A flood of emails and phone calls immediately ensued. Readers said they found her story inspiring. One mailed in a handwritten poem, a paean of praise for the brave Expressway Chicken, with a lovely collage.
One woman who said she had seen the chicken fall from its truck said, “I just think that [the chicken] has fought to stay alive against overwhelming odds and deserves a decent chance.”
Even in those pre-Twitter days the story grew fast. The Richmond Times-Dispatch ran articles. Local TV news sent a reporter and videographer to the median. Style sent a photographer.
But the chicken was wary, the underbrush thick and tangled. When TV cameras and photographers arrived, they found nothing.
People loved it. Still, as the coverage ballooned I became worried. Someone could wind up hurting the chicken. Or themselves.
This was no job for amateurs. We called the experts for help.
“It was an extremely unusual situation,” recalls Carla Murray, director of marketing and communications at Maymont. In 2001 she had not been in her position at the nonprofit long but knew that while Maymont sometimes takes in injured Virginia wildlife and operates a small children’s farm, it is not in the business of rescuing escaped chickens from medians.
But Murray also knew that the public’s eye was on this chicken. She adds: “It was about just helping a living thing. This animal was at the risk of being run over — surely that would have happened at some point.”
Maymont’s team went to work.
Former Maymont zoologist Debbie Rea recalls that on her first visit to the median, she found signs — an egg, feathers — but no chicken.
A few days later, Rea and some fellow Maymont staffers arranged to have police stop traffic on the expressway while they tried to snag the chicken with a net. No good. The bird proved too wily, the brush too thick. They returned empty-handed and gloomy. They knew the bird was living on borrowed time.
Rea racked her brain. She had grown up on a farm. She knew chickens. What would this chicken want? Food, of course. And water — there had been no rain for days.
So the third time Rea visited the median, she placed some humane traps baited with chicken feed, water and grapes.
The next day she returned. Inside a trap she found a chicken, annoyed but alive and well. A white leghorn, Rea thought, a production bird raised to be eaten, and no more than 6 months old: a teenager by chicken standards.
How did she feel? Rea chuckles. “It felt good to rescue her,” she says, but mostly “it was a relief we didn’t have to go back there with all that traffic.”
Rea brought the chicken to Maymont. After a quarantine and a vet inspection, by April that year she was deemed safe to join the small flock at the Children’s Barn. Maymont held a public contest to name the famous bird. The winning submission: Freeda.
Freeda spent her remaining days in peace with her new flock of a half-dozen chickens and a rooster, warm and safe in the barn, fed regular meals of grain augmented with grapes, lettuce and strawberries. Rea reports that Freeda got along well with the other animals.
Visitors sometimes pointed her out to their children, Rea recalls. “There she is. There’s Freeda.” She stood out, a humble white leghorn among the glamorous dark-feathered heritage birds.
Freeda died of natural causes about six years later, a reasonable life for a chicken. By then the furor over her adventures had faded. Her passing went publicly unremarked.
But for those who remember, her daring escape and courage still inspire. “We need these little metaphors,” Murray reflects, “these little reminders to enjoy life.”
After all, if a plucky young chicken can flee a terrible existence and find a new and better one, maybe — just maybe — anyone can.
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