Tucked away at the end of a long dirt driveway near a pond in what Marsi Parker Darwin calls “the wilds of Waterloo,” lives a very famous chicken named Peanut. Marsi and her husband, Bill Darwin, have a hundred other birds on their thirty-seven-acre farm—including chickens, ducks, peacocks, guinea fowl, and a few parrots—but Marsi’s bantam hen, Peanut, age twenty-one, stole the spotlight earlier this year after she was named the “World’s Oldest Living Chicken” by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Photo: J. Adrian Wylie
“We just had a reporter out here from the London Times,” says Marsi, who’s also fielded visits and calls from NPR, the Washington Post, the ABC Morning News, and more. As she and Bill sit in their family room with Peanut and Peanut’s daughter, Millie (age fifteen), in a cage nearby, she shares Peanut’s tale of survival.
Back in 2002, Marsi had walked to their pond to dispose of a cold, abandoned egg, but then heard a faint chirp. She peeled the little chick she later named “Peanut” out of its shell and raised her inside their house for a couple years until she joined the other chickens outside.
Marsi, a retired Stockbridge librarian, tells the rest of the story in her self-published picture book, My Girl Peanut and Me: On Love and Life from the World’s Oldest Chicken.
While Peanut has Marsi to thank for her long life—she gets top-notch chicken feed, organic blueberries, homemade yogurt, and “Marsi’s love,” Bill says—she has neighbor Todd Gillihan to thank for her worldwide fame. Gillihan “pestered me” to go for the world record, says Marsi, and “to humor him, I sent in the application,” which was verified with the help of veterinary records.
“It’s a treat out here” with neighbors like the Darwins, says Gillihan, who lives with his partner David Riddle on Waterloo Rd. and met the couple because they also raise peacocks. The neighbors have bonfires together and Marsi makes cookies and muffins she drops off at their door.
Bill’s parents bought the Beeman Rd. property, called “Darwin’s Eden,” in 1978, and after Bill and Marsi married in 1990 (they met when she took a stained-glass class that he taught at the Waterloo Farm Museum), they built their own house there in a corn field. It’s a “joy,” Marsi says, to have Bill’s nephew and his young family now living in the original house.
The property features a stained-glass studio where Bill creates custom windows for churches and homes and restores antique slot machines, as well as a professional croquet court where Bill hosted the Waterloo Croquet Club for thirty years. Peanut likes to stroll there because “the grass is short and she doesn’t have to lift her feet much,” Bill says.
For all her fame, Peanut hasn’t forgotten her Chelsea roots. Gillihan recently helped Marsi organize Peanut’s appearance in the Chelsea Community Fair Parade where they wore chicken hats, threw candy to the crowd, and played the “Chicken Dance” song on repeat. As they made their way through the streets with Peanut on Marsi’s lap in the back of a pickup truck, the crowd cheered and shouted her name.
