Poultry pioneer’s suicide revisited

Raising chickens on a commercial scale quickly became one of Southeast Louisiana’s most vital industries in the 1950s, primarily due to the vision of one man, 32-year-old Leo Luke Lea, an instructor with the Veterans Farm Training Program.

According to a March 22, 1953, multi-page feature in the Advocate newspaper, poultry breeders from across the state flocked to hear lectures from Luke Lea, hoping to take home the secrets of his success.

The Associated Press picked up the feature and distributed Lea’s story nationwide. Two months later, the State Times celebrated news of Luke and Beatrice Lea’s newborn son.

No one imagined that eight months later, Luke Lea would be dead.

Luke Lea grew up in Pride, Louisiana, and was a star athlete; he graduated high school in 1939. After college, he started work as a high school basketball referee and moved to Denham Springs.

Returning home to Louisiana after World War II, Lea got assistance from the GI Bill and started a program to assist farmers when the income from truck crops became slim.

In November of 1948, Lea married Beatrice Mildred Hoover and moved to her hometown of Albany. There, Lea insisted farmers learn from past problems and adapt. When the chickens from the fields ate the strawberry crop, Lea had them build a large poultry house for the flock to lay and live indoors. When the egg market grew over-saturated, Lea instructed breeders to supply the hatcheries.

Lea traveled the state lecturing against the traditional one-crop farming system, insisting that local farmers needed a supplemental crop to survive. At first, Lea considered dairy and beef but soon realized the small acreage of the average south Louisiana truck farmer would not support large herds of cattle.

Eventually, Lea proved that only poultry could save the parish’s dying farms. He had identified the right supplement but still needed someone interested in helping him launch the project. He found someone in Travis Lobell of Springfield, initially the only Livingston Parish farmer he could convince to invest in poultry on a commercial scale.

One of the truck farmers’ most significant objections to the poultry business was that free-range chickens were highly destructive to farm crops. Still, Lea proposed a radical solution to the problem. He suggested that from the time of their arrival as chicks until the day they went to market, growers would keep the chickens confined. Lea proposed a new type of hen house, one large enough for chickens to live in continually, going open range only when fields had no crops.

Because of the mildness of Louisiana winters, the biggest problem, he said, was one of space rather than one of material. For that reason, he proposed an open hen house, merely a roof with a supporting framework and wire stretched around the braces, rather than expensive lumber for walling.

Breeders would keep part of this house closed to serve as a brooder room for hatchlings. Enlarging the area around the brooder room as the chickens grew provided more space until the birds filled the whole structure, where they would live until sold.

Lea instructed farmers to allow four square feet per bird, insisting a poultry house built following his plan, with 40 x 100 feet dimensions, would be large enough to accommodate 1,000 laying hens—from the time of their arrival until the day they went to market.

He also proposed the cycling of manure to the fields instead of purchasing expensive fertilizers. He eventually replaced the old farm brooders (kerosene heated) with ones heated by gas or electricity, and his water systems became automatic.

While working as a traveling fertilizer sales clerk, Lea started his personal flock back in Denham Springs in 1946 by ordering 250 New Hampshire Red baby chicks.

By 1953, he and his partners no longer ordered chicks by the 100s; they purchased them by the 1,000s.

On arrival, Lea instructed farmers to cull the chicks rigidly, vaccinating each bird as they entered the brooders. He provided them with a detailed feeding, vaccination, and culling regiment that gave each grower self-sustaining farms, hatching their chicks and leveraging moneymaking flocks by selling eggs, chicks, and meat.

Eggs were candled, weighed, cleaned, and packed in cases of 30 dozen eggs per case. They were transported weekly by truck or shipped by express to hatcheries across the country. Some eggs went to large packinghouses in New Orleans and other large cities. Others shipped as far as Havana, Cuba, by air.

By 1954, Luke Lea and his partner, Travis Lobell, were on the fast track to becoming wealthy men when—according to the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office—Luke Lea committed suicide with a shotgun.

On July 31, 1954, Livingston Parish coroner Dr. Montgomery Williams presided over a coroner’s inquest at the Hollabaugh-Seale funeral home in Baton Rouge. Lea had been missing from his home since Monday, July 26.

Hunting a lost calf in the area one mile north of Centerville, cattleman Reid Martin and his sons discovered a body the following Thursday morning. The corpse—wearing the same green shirt and khaki trousers newspapers described Luke Lea as wearing when he disappeared—lay on a partially overgrown cow path approximately 309 feet from Red Oak Road.

Livingston Parish Sheriff Taft Faust, his deputies, and state police had been combing the parish, looking for Lea since his disappearance. When Reid Martin phoned the sheriff’s office, state trooper Ivan Foster responded. Luke Lea’s brother, Lawrence Lea, arrived with Foster and identified the body. The state police plane flew overhead, searching the area, and simultaneously identified Lea’s car.

The sheriff and the coroner drove to the scene, but heavy rain prevented Dr. Williams from holding the inquest on-site.

In Baton Rouge, Sheriff Faust told the jury he found a suicide note in Lea’s papers shortly before the inquest began. Friends and relatives also testified that Lea had been “melancholy.”

Faust testified that Foster found Lea’s body eight feet from his 1952 green Dodge coupe, parked in a small clearing in the woods. Foster, he said, described seeing a 16-gauge shotgun near the dead man’s outstretched hand. Sheriff Faust said investigators found one fired shell inside the gun and the cash Lea collected for the Mathew’s Feed Company inside the car’s glove box.

The coroner’s jury returned an official verdict of “Death by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.” In 2019, a relative of the deceased phoned me recently, asking that I research the case.

The relative—who asked that I not use his name—wonders why Sheriff Faust elected not to present the alleged suicide note to the jury. He also wonders why Trooper Foster did not attend the inquest. Generally, he wonders why Luke Lea, a local celebrity with an infant child at home, took his own life and chose such an awkward weapon to accomplish the deed.

After reviewing the case, I also still wonder.