Lakeside Poultry Exchange

For many longtime Lakewood residents, the name Lakeside Poultry Exchange needs little introduction. They remember the farm on Winch Road, the trucks, the feed, the chickens, and the unmistakable rhythms of a working agricultural business. Yet like many places woven into everyday community life, its history was not always carefully written down. What survives instead is a scattered record: photographs, signs, family memories, and the recollections of people who once passed the farm, worked nearby, or knew the Hazzard family.

The photographs in this collection bring that lost world suddenly back into view.

There is the tall, practical farm building with LAKESIDE POULTRY EXCHANGE painted across its side, its walls covered with advertisements for poultry feed and farm supplies. In front sit the vehicles that connected the farm to the wider community: trucks built for work rather than display, carrying feed and poultry supplies along Lakewood’s rural roads. One bears the farm’s name prominently on the door—Lakeside Poultry Exch., Lakewood, N.Y.—while another is marked simply LAKESIDE, as though no further explanation were required.

The business appears to have been more than a private family farm. The signs visible in the photographs advertise poultry feed, farm service, and supplies, suggesting that Lakeside Poultry Exchange also served other farmers and poultry keepers in the area. A Wayne Feeds sign hangs on the building, while the lettering on one truck identifies it as a poultry-supply vehicle. Together, these details point to a place where the raising of birds, the sale or exchange of poultry, and the practical business of supplying local farms may all have come together.

That matters because the Lakewood remembered today can easily appear more residential than agricultural. Yet beyond the lakeside cottages, village streets, and summer businesses stood farms that helped sustain local families and connect Lakewood to the agricultural economy of Chautauqua County. Winch Road was part of that landscape. The Lakeside Poultry Exchange belonged to an era when feed trucks, barns, commercial poultry operations, and family-run agricultural businesses were familiar parts of life on the outskirts of the village.

The Hazzard family’s poultry operation appears to have been active during the middle decades of the twentieth century, likely around the period many residents now remember from childhood. The vehicles, advertising signs, and construction visible in the surviving photographs are consistent with that broad era, although the museum has not yet located enough business records or newspaper documentation to establish a precise opening date, closing date, or complete timeline. For now, the photographs remain some of the strongest evidence of what the operation looked like and how it presented itself to the community.

They also capture something less easily documented: the personality of the place.

This was not a polished storefront designed for tourists. It was a working property. The building’s painted signs, stacked advertisements, delivery trucks, and practical additions reflect a business that grew around use. Feed arrived and departed. Vehicles were loaded. Customers came for supplies. Birds were raised, handled, or traded. The farm’s identity was written directly onto its walls and trucks, visible to anyone traveling along Winch Road.

That visibility may help explain why so many people still remember it.

Local history is often preserved through grand houses, famous names, and major public events. But communities are equally shaped by places like the Lakeside Poultry Exchange: family businesses whose routines became part of the local landscape. They supplied neighbors, employed residents, supported farms, and gave a road or neighborhood its familiar character. People remember not only what happened there, but how it felt to know the place was there.

The Hazzard family’s farm is therefore more than a vanished business. It is part of Lakewood’s agricultural memory—a reminder that the village’s history includes barns and feed trucks as surely as it includes lakefront hotels and elegant summer homes.

Much of this story is still waiting to be recovered. The museum is seeking photographs, advertisements, receipts, feed bags, business records, newspaper clippings, and personal memories connected to the Lakeside Poultry Exchange and the Hazzard family. We would especially like to learn who worked there, what the farm produced, how customers used the exchange, when the business operated, and what eventually became of the property.

Perhaps you remember the trucks. Perhaps your family bought feed there, worked there, lived nearby, or kept photographs of the farm. Even a small detail—a name, a date, a childhood memory—may help us rebuild the story.

The building may be gone or changed, and the work of the farm may have fallen silent, but the Lakeside Poultry Exchange has not disappeared entirely. It survives in these photographs, in the memories attached to Winch Road, and in the people who still speak of it decades later.

Sometimes that is where a community’s history begins: not with a complete written record, but with an old photograph and someone saying, “I remember that place.”