FINGER-LICKIN' GOOD: Rose Hill tops the charts in pork and poultry production, sweet muscadine wine, and large cooking utensils.

• Author: Mims, Bryan

On the first Saturday of November, men wearing aprons and wielding pitchforks gather around a great big cauldron crackling with breasts, legs, thighs and wings. They watch the white meat turn gold and greasy in 200 gallons of cooking oil, which is what it takes to fill the World's Largest Frying Pan. And in Rose Hill --with an estimated population of 1,623--that's something to crow about.

It sits in full glory at the corner of Main and Sycamore, enshrined beneath a red-roofed gazebo on the town square with a sign expounding its grandness. From its 6-foot handle to its 45-foot circumference, heated with 40 gas burners, the 2-ton pan is capable of cooking 365 chickens at a time.

It's no wonder why such a wondrously large pan is the star attraction of the North Carolina Poultry Jubilee, the signature event in the eastern North Carolina town 45 miles north of Wilmington. "The town would about quadruple in size," says Forest Hawes, a 56-year-old native who works at the Trading Co. of Rose Hill, a downtown hardware and feed store. The store's owner, Wally Short, chimes in: "It was a big thing years ago."

Recessions and hurricanes during Rose Hill's 56-year history ate away at the crowds. After Hurricane Matthew scrubbed it in 2016, the town moved the jubilee from early October to the first weekend in November. Even if the event is smaller than it was back in the early days, the jubilee is still finger-lickin' good, frying up piles of chicken and paying tribute to the area's poultry prominence. House of Raeford Farms, one of the top 10 U.S. poultry producers, was hatched and is now headquartered in Rose Hill. Drive into town from the north on U.S. 117, and you'll see the company's "Big Ed" feed mill tower looming over the Duplin County farm fields like a concrete monolith.

Farmers in these parts have long been raising chickens for meat and eggs. In the 1950s, a local transplant named Dennis Ramsey, whose movie theater went dark as more living rooms glowed with TV screens, decided to make money by building a chicken house. He contracted with local farmers to raise the birds and called his business Ramsey Feed Co.

At the same time in the same town, Marvin and Bizzell Johnson were selling a lot of turkeys. They liked Ramsey's contract-farming model and chose to do the same with their own birds. In 1955, the brothers and their father, Nash Johnson, built their first feed mill in Rose Hill. Four years later, they opened a chicken hatchery, outselling...