The Rural Voice, 2003-10, Page 34A11
Creatures
Great and
Small
Alvin Wallace holds his proud
peacock, one of the Tess
exotic animals that have been
art of his menagerie.
Alvin Wallace has such
a fascination with
animals that he has
shared his house with
evergthing from
alligators to owls.
By Rachel Wallace -
Oberle
At the end of Alvin Wallace's
lane, a large turkey keeps
watch from its perch on the
mailbox. The fierce white fowl with
its brilliant red wattle greets the mail
lady with a glare each morning.
Snipped from tin and lovingly hand
painted, this piece of art is a
harbinger of the whimsy iesiding at
this RR2, Blyth farm.
In his teens, Alvin considered
becoming an artist or writer, but
decided instead to purchase the 100 -
acre farm from his father Robert
Wallace. Grandfather John Wallace
raised cattle and crops on this land in
the early 1900s.
Robert Wallace grew crops and
raised cattle, pigs and horses. He also
raised 15,000 turkeys annually.
They were sold to grocery stores and
processed and sold in his Wallace
Turkey Products plant in Blyth, a
small village about four miles away.
Alvin and his bride Corrie, who
30 THE RURAL VOICE
emigrated from Holland at the age of
nineteen and moved into the house
next door, took over in 1958. Wallace
Turkey Products was sold to relatives
and Robert retired and moved to
Blyth.
Beneath the young couple's care,
operations ran smoothly. Land was
rented to plant more crops. Two
children were born and their son
Boris began working on the farm
after he married. He lives just across
the field with his family and works
closely with his father, hoping to
eventually take the helm.
Over the years, a fascinating
assortment of animals has paraded
through the ranch. Discovering baby
alligators for sale at the local grocery
store one day, Alvin paid five dollars
and came home with three. Two died
but the third decided it liked its new
surroundings and grew to almost four
feet long. It was kept in a cage in the
house and then later moved out to the
turkey hatchery.
"It became quite vicious; I had to
be careful how I handled it," Alvin
says with a laugh. During the
summer, the alligator lived in a pond
behind the barn and showed a
penchant for stalking the family dog.
It met its demise several years later
when a heat lamp started a fire in the
hatchery.
Alvin's long love affair with
animals resulted in the capture of five
female skunks one spring. To his
surprise, he discovered they were all
pregnant; the count soon swelled to
thirty-two. They were kept in cages
in the barn. "I was never sprayed
once. Skunks are fairly docile and
make wonderful pets," he says
matter-of-factly. Eventually he
released them back into their natural
habitat.
A young groundhog was kept as a
pet until it became too nasty to
handle and a ferocious brown gander