Saratoga Massacre

Few miles east of Saratoga Springs, N. Y., famed socialite-racing-gambling-health resort where the cornerstone of a new spa building was laid last fortnight (TIME, July 24), lies Schuylerville, once called Saratoga, whose inhabitants were massacred by French & Indians in 1745. One mile west of Saratoga Springs lies Ashgrove Farm, Edward Barber Ashton's "million-dollar" turkey ranch.

Every August Owner Ashton, a Saratoga Springs coal dealer, rents his farm for $7,500 to William Ziegler Jr., sports-man-treasurer of New York's Republican State Committee. Rest of the year he uses it chiefly as a place to raise turkeys. Thither he has imported many a blooded gobbler, a Swiss turkey expert to tend them.

One evening last fortnight Ashgrove's two-acre turkey field lay calm and ordered, with some 1,000 turkeys roosting on bark-limbed perches or in their big, immaculately whitewashed house. Next morning the field was a shambles of blood, feathers, mangled turkeys and broken glass. At first attendants thought there must be 300 turkeys lying with tooth-marked backs and broken necks. A count cut their estimate to 153. No one had seen the marauders, but it took no Pinkerton man to deduce their identity. Mongrel German police dogs from nearby farms, running singly or in pairs, had been making sheep and poultry raids in the neighborhood. Reconstructing the scene, Ashgrove employes saw the dogs burrowing under the field's six-foot wire fence, descending on the helpless turkeys, tossing them through windows in frenzied bloodlust. New York law requires each county to indemnify owners of livestock killed by raiding dogs. Day after the slaughter an assessor was at Ashgrove appraising the damage. One day last week Saratoga County heard how much the turkeys had cost it--$459, at three dollars a head. Next night, despite Ashgrove's armed watchman, the dogs got in again, killed five more turkeys. No three-dollar birds were these. Part of Turkeyman Ashton's breeding stock, they cost the county $25 each.

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