Native Chicken: Rhode Island Red
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The Rhode Island Red was bred in Rhode Island and Massachusetts in the second half of the nineteenth century, by selective breeding of birds of Oriental origin such as the Cochin, Java, Malay and Shanghai with brown Leghorn birds from Italy. The characteristic deep red plumage derived from the Malay. The State of Rhode Island celebrated the centenary of the breed in 1954, when the Rhode Island Red Monument was raised at the William Tripp farm, in Little Compton, Rhode Island.
The name of the breed is ascribed either to Isaac Champlin Wilbour of Little Compton at an unknown date, or to a Mr. Jenny of the Southern Massachusetts Poultry Association in 1879 or 1880. In 1891 Nathaniel Borden Aldrich exhibited some as "Golden Buffs" in Rhode Island and in Philadelphia; they were first exhibited under the present name in 1895. They were previously also known as "John Macomber fowls" or "Tripp fowls."
The first breed standard was drawn up in 1898, and was approved by the American Rhode Island Red Club in Boston in 1901; the single-comb variety was admitted to the Standard of Perfection of the American Poultry Association in 1904, and the rose-comb in 1906. In 1925, the Rhode Island Red Club of America donated funds for a monument to the Rhode Island Red in Adamsville, and the monument is now on the National Register of Historic Places. Another monument was erected by the state in 1988 commemorating the farmers who grew them commercially in Little Compton; it is located about a mile south of Adamsville.