Corbett Portrait Unveiling Friday
Contact: Joe Carr at (207) 581-3571
ORONO — Fifteen years after the University of Maine’s Donald P. Corbett Business Building opened, a portrait of the successful poultry farmer who graduated in 1934 will be unveiled at 10 a.m. Friday, May 9, in the Dean’s Office Suite in Room 211.
The portrait was presented to the university recently by Ann Corbett Lucas, a 1961 UMaine alum and the oldest daughter of Donald Corbett, who died in 1988 after nearly 45 years in the poultry business. It had been hanging in the American Poultry Historical Society’s Hall of Fame in Beltsville, Md., which recognized Don Corbett in 1980 for his outstanding achievements in the poultry industry.
In 1995 when portraits of honorees were replaced with plaques, the picture was given to Francelia Corbett, Don’s wife, who in 1991 made the $1 million naming gift for the building to honor her late husband. A 1934 UMaine graduate, Francelia died in 2007.
“The painting belongs in the building that was named for my father,” said Lucas, who lives in Pittsfield, Mass., with her husband, Robert, also a 1961 UMaine graduate.
It also will serve as a reminder to students that success doesn’t belong only to corporate executives, she added.
The owner of the 14th largest broiler producer operation in the country, Corbett had operations in Alabama, Mississippi, Maryland and Indiana as well as Maine. In the 1950’s, he rented an abandoned industrial plant and founded the Fort Halifax Poultry Company, one of the first completely integrated poultry companies in the world.
After selling the Fort Halifax Poultry Company to Ralston Purina Company in 1961, he joined Ralston in St. Louis as a corporate vice-president. Under his administration, Ralston Purina became the largest broiler producer in the world with plants throughout the country and overseas.
In 1968 he left Purina and became executive vice-president of Arbor Acres Farm. Four years later he founded Corbett Enterprises, Inc., which could process nearly three million birds weekly. Corbett Enterprises also was in the egg business with more than three million laying hens in Maine, Florida, Georgia, Alabama and Arkansas. At one time it was the sixth largest egg producer in the country. Dried and processed eggs were sold to companies including Quaker Oats, Keebler, Entenmanns and General Mills for use in prepared and packaged foods. He also was involved in the poultry business in Venezuela, Pakistan, and Thailand.
“One of the things that made him successful was that he was good with numbers,” Lucas said. “He could take a profit and loss sheet that someone else prepared, and know in an instant if it was correct. Numbers were definitely his thing.”
Corbett grew up outside of Boston and planned on attending Cornell University until he spent a summer in Orono with his uncle, then UMaine’s dean of men, according to his daughter.
“This kid from the city decided he liked Maine and that he wanted to attend UMaine and major in animal husbandry,” she said.