This site is a searchable archive of the documentary evidence behind the book Chicken Power: The Clift & Dorothy Lane Story. Clift and Dorothy Lane built one of the largest privately owned poultry companies in America — nineteen plants across six states, twelve thousand employees — before financial trouble in 1985 forced them into a Chapter 11 reorganization. What followed was anything but routine.
The materials gathered here include court filings, sworn affidavits, internal Department of Justice memoranda, congressional correspondence, audited financial statements, news coverage, private letters, and photographs — assembled to let readers see the original record for themselves. The board is organized as a detective’s wall: each card represents a piece of evidence, pinned in chronological era from The Rise through Peak & Collapse, The Transfer, Sale & Aftermath, and the decades of investigation that followed.
This archive is the companion to the forthcoming book that traces the Lane family from a small farm outside Grannis, Arkansas, to the top of the American poultry industry — and through the bankruptcy, the trust, the sale to Tyson, the decade of declined prosecutions, and the congressional and Department of Justice investigations that followed. Every document on this board is cited in the book; every chapter in the book is backed by documents on this board.
“A documentary record compiled from court dockets, press archives,
private correspondence, and witness accounts.”