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Perdue Farms

American meat processing company

Layered newspapers, civic records and oral-history reels arranged as chronological evidence
History and societyInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ7167716 ↗
Source-derived summary

Perdue Farms is the parent company of Perdue Foods and Perdue AgriBusiness, based in Salisbury, Maryland. Perdue Foods is a major chicken, turkey, and pork processing company in the United States. Perdue AgriBusiness ranks among the top United States grain companies. Perdue Farms had 2021 annual sales of $8 billion.

History

Origin and war era

The company was founded in 1920 by Arthur Perdue with his wife, Pearl Perdue, who had been keeping a small flock of chickens. The company started out selling table eggs, then in 1925, Perdue built the company's first hatchery, and switched to selling layer chicks to farmers instead of eggs. His son Frank Perdue joined the company in 1939 at age 19 after dropping out of college.

Post-war growth

The company was incorporated as A.W. Perdue & Son and Frank Perdue assumed leadership in the 1950s. The company also began contracting with local farmers to raise its birds and supplying chickens for processing as well as opening a second hatchery in North Carolina during this period.

Full integration

Perdue entered the grain and oilseed business by building grain receiving and storage facilities and Maryland's first soybean processing plant.

Editorial summary

“Perdue Farms” enters the record as american meat processing company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Perdue, Farms and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewMost valuable as an event-and-institution map that identifies actors, dates and record creators for deeper historical inquiry. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2021, 1920, 1925, 1939—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1920-01-01. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Perdue, Farms and American.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Perdue Farms” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Perdue, Farms and American provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7167716. VIAF identifies the subject as 144245910. The Library of Congress control number is n80094894. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2021, 1920, 1925 and 1939.

Critical limits

Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.

Best used for
  • Event chronology
  • Institutional context
  • Locating named record creators
Verify next

Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Perdue Farms”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Perdue Farms primary sources, Perdue Farms archive and Perdue research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Perdue Farms”?
  2. What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
  3. Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Perdue Farms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.