Chicken magnate Frank Perdue’s marketing genius killed Belfast, Maine as the Chicken Capital of the World – but his magic apparently didn’t rub off on his wife.
So Mitzi Perdue, his widow, has dropped the asking price of the family’s New Hampshire mansion by $5 million.
Just goes to show – marketing genius isn’t transferrable.
Perdue was so good at selling chickens that the Maine site of the former annual Belfast Broiler Festival is no longer processing poultry.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Mrs. Purdue first put the family homestead on the market for $15 million.
But now she’s put it on a Black Friday sale for $10 million, hoping that’ll sweeten the palate of would-be buyers.
Knollwood, a circa-1900 estate in Dublin, New Hampshire, is about 80 miles northwest of Boston.
Located at the base of Mount Monadnock, the home is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and has 40-mile views over more than 100 acres of land.
The property is anchored by a nearly 15,000-square-foot Georgian-revival mansion.
Even with the price cut, the asking price is far more than any home sale in the area, listing records show.
The next-most expensive residence is a modern six bedroom home on 159 acres on the other side of Mount Monadnock in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, asking $4.75 million.
Knollwood has been in the Purdue/Henderson family for 70 years. Sheraton Hotels founder Ernest Henderson was Mitzi Purdue’s father.
Knollwood has only had two owners since it was built by Franklin MacVeagh, U.S. secretary of the treasury.
In its early years, it was visited by the likes of Mark Twain and President William Howard Taft.
Frank Perdue made a fortune with his ad that featured him saying “it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”
Bets are he probably would have been able to unload Norwood for $15 million if he’d been in charge of the advertising.
Or, put another way, he probably would have had a leg up on the sale.
Perdue’s company at one point employed nearly 15,000 people and shipped millions of chickens and turkeys weekly to markets and butcher shops from Maine to Florida.
Frank Perdue’s marketing magic helped mark the end of the longstanding poultry-farming tradition in Belfast, Maine, a city once known as the “Chicken Capital Of The World.”
Belfast was a major poultry processing hub for many decades following World War II, processing over 200,000 birds daily.
The industry saw a slow decline over time, but the closure of the last major local processor marked its end.
The final blow came when Commonwealth Poultry, the last USDA-certified chicken processor in Maine and New England, closed its doors last year.
A representative for a local farm called it a “classic business problem” that was also affected by the increasing consolidation of the meat industry.
Thanks a lot Frank.
