Ray Ernest Firestone (25 February 1906–6 August 1962), poultryman, was born in Nace, Botetourt County, and was the son of Florence Mae Strickler Firestone and Ernest Cleveland Firestone, a vegetable canner and poultryman. During his childhood in Troutville, he tended a flock of hens and sold eggs to his father for spending money. Firestone attended Bridgewater College for two years and transferred in 1927 to Roanoke College, from which he received a B.S. in business administration in 1928. After serving one year as principal of a Botetourt County high school, he worked as a statistician for Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., in New York City. Returning to Virginia early in the 1930s, he operated several vegetable canning plants in Southside and southwestern counties. On 4 September 1934 he married Mary Frances Cannaday in Troutville. They had one daughter.
Early in the twentieth century, growing urban markets, a decline in household animal husbandry, and the expansion of artificial refrigeration stimulated demand for store-bought food; at the same time, advances in feeds, vaccinations, and assembly-line technology made possible the mass production of poultry. Sales of chickens, turkeys, and eggs increased rapidly in Virginia, and by the 1940s poultry had become the state's most valuable cash crop. In 1936 Firestone became vice president of Troutville Poultry Farm, Inc., a commercial hatchery his father had established in 1919 and incorporated eight years later. Under his management the company constructed a new plant, expanded production, and became one of the state's largest suppliers of baby chicks to raisers of flocks. By 1951 the hatchery, operating at capacity, could produce 259,000 chicks every twenty-one days.
An early participant in a trend toward vertical integration within the industry, Firestone organized two companies early in the 1940s to complement the poultry farm. The Valley Feed and Supply Company, incorporated in 1950 with Firestone as president and with his brother, Joseph Bennett Firestone, as vice president, manufactured feed and became one of the nation's largest businesses of its kind. Firestone and Company, incorporated the same year with the same officers, prepared chickens for delivery to grocery retailers and became a major supplier of several regional divisions of the Kroger Co. In April 1950 Firestone held an open house to unveil the company's new processing plant, which employed more than one hundred people and featured a modern assembly line capable of slaughtering and dressing 2,400 chickens per hour. Firestone had designed some of the plant's innovative components, and on 30 December 1952 he received a patent for a bag-filling machine. Southern States Cooperative, Inc., a rapidly expanding Richmond-based farmers' cooperative, bought both the Valley Feed and Supply Company and Firestone and Company in 1958 and acquired the Troutville Poultry Farm the following year. In 1959 the cooperative named Firestone its director of hatchery and poultry marketing services.
As purveyors of various commodities competed for consumers' attention in the new marketplace for commercially available food, Firestone became a leader of the poultry industry's efforts to promote chicken and egg consumption, and he achieved national prominence as an expert in poultry hatching, processing, and marketing. Elected in 1948 to the presidency of the Virginia Baby Chick Association, an organization for operators of hatcheries, he encouraged hatchery customers to join the alliance as well and oversaw a dramatic increase in membership. Firestone led the group for two years and then sat on its board of directors from 1952 to 1959. For fourteen years he served as a director of the Kansas City–based International Baby Chick Association (after 1951 the American Poultry and Hatchery Federation). In 1961 Firestone was elected president of the organization, which worked to support and improve professional poultry husbandry. The Poultry and Egg National Board, established to develop new markets for the industry's products, named him to lead its Virginia fund-raising campaigns for several years late in the 1940s and early in the 1950s and awarded him an outstanding service citation in 1953. For three years Firestone sat on the board of directors of the Southeastern Poultry and Egg Association, based in Georgia, and in 1953 and 1954 he served as president of the National Good Egg Club, an honorary group composed of friends of the industry.
In 1949 Firestone was elected vice president of the Virginia State Poultry Federation, Inc., the commonwealth's largest and most influential poultry association, and the next year he became president. The federation, representing the interests of hatchery owners, feed producers, flock owners, and turkey and broiler processors, sought to increase poultry production by stimulating consumption, disseminating educational materials, and lobbying elected officials. At a Georgia conference in May 1954, Firestone was named to a three-member committee charged with drafting the constitution and bylaws of a proposed national council for the promotion of the broiler chicken industry. The following month members of the council's temporary board met in Washington, D.C., where they formally established the National Broiler Council, adopted the constitution, and elected Firestone executive vice president. Later known as the National Chicken Council, the organization became the nation's primary trade association for producers, processors, and distributors of chickens.
Deeply interested in local community development, Firestone established Troutville's public water system, and in 1949 he organized the Troutville Improvement League (incorporated in 1953 as the Troutville Civic League), which he served as president for several years. He chaired the Botetourt County board of agriculture and the county public school advisory committee, served as a director of the local chamber of commerce, and was a charter member and later president of the Troutville Lions Club. He was a director and in 1962 became president of the Southwest Virginia Investment Corporation, which invested in corporate securities and real estate. Ray Ernest Firestone died at a Roanoke hospital of heart failure on 6 August 1962. He was buried at Sherwood Memorial Park, in Salem.
Sources Consulted:
Birth and death dates, birthplace, and parents' names in Death Certificate, Roanoke City, Bureau of Vital Statistics (BVS), Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); biographies in National Cyclopædia of American Biography (1965), 48:108, William Couper, History of the Shenandoah Valley (1952), 3:314–315 (portrait), and Richard Lee Morton, comp., Virginia Lives: The Old Dominion Who's Who (1964), 324; BVS Marriage Register, Roanoke City; State Corporation Commission Charter Book, 141:221–223, 231:600–601, 232:600–602, Record Group 112, LVA; Fincastle Herald, 13 Apr. 1950; Commonwealth 18 (1951): 17; Virginia Poultryman 5 (June 1951): 3, ibid. 7 (Aug. 1953): 10, ibid. 7 (Oct. 1953): 66, ibid. 8 (June 1954): 10, ibid. 8 (July 1954): 5, 20, ibid. 13 (Dec. 1959): 21–22, and ibid. 15 (Aug. 1961): 5 (with cover portrait); Processing Equipment News 7 (Oct. 1953): 3–9, 12; Roanoke Times, 21 July 1961; obituaries in Richmond Times-Dispatch, Roanoke Times, and Roanoke World-News, all 7 Aug. 1962, Washington Post and Times Herald, 8 Aug. 1962, Fincastle Herald, 9 Aug. 1962, and Virginia Poultryman 16 (Sept. 1962): 16.