Tyson Foods Unveils Founders Room To Honor John and Don Tyson

Kim Souza with our content partner, The City Wire, reports on a new feature for business historians on the campus of Tyson Foods’ Springdale world headquarters:

A father and son stand side-by-side in the trenches pioneering through the early poultry days in Springdale. That’s the image welcoming visitors to the new Founders Room developed at the request of the late Don Tyson.

The 1,500 square-foot gallery takes visitors back to 1935, paying tribute to founder John W. Tyson and son Don who together built one of the world’s largest meat companies from their humble home in Springdale.

The museum-like exhibit is on display at Tyson Foods’ Springdale corporate headquarters in the spot where the executive offices were originally located.

The project has been a labor of love by the Tyson family, workers and designers Todd and Tracy Johnson of Texas-based Circa Inc. as they pulled together 77 years of company history in an informative display that captures the essence of Tyson’s success.

There are more 300 photos on display, which were selected from 1,000 items gathered for the permanent exhibit. There is a mini screening room which shows rare video footage of a 1974 corporate film of Don Tyson, Leland Tollett and Buddy Wray, the executives who steered Tyson through five decades of monumental growth.

Wray, a veteran Tyson executive, recently shared that “Mr. John Tyson” came to the chicken business almost by accident. He said the young John W. Tyson routinely hauled hay from his family farm in Missouri down to market on Saturday located on Emma Avenue in Springdale. One day in 1935 another merchant selling chickens had some left at the end of the day.

Wray said the senior Tyson took those live chickens back with him and sold them in larger markets like Kansas City and St. Louis for more profit than the hay business offered. This wholesale live bird business eventually spawned Tyson Feed and Hatchery, which evolved into a Fortune 500 company with $32 billion in annual sales and still bearing the Tyson family name.

Wray said Don idolized his father and together, “they made a great team.” He said Don was a tremendous leader with grand ideas, but his father was the anchor that kept the company grounded through its formative years.

Tyson Foods, like so many other poultry companies, was almost acquired around 1957 by Swanson Foods. But Don had other ideas. He encouraged his father to build its first processing plant in 1958, and the rest they say is history.

Read more on the subject from Souza at The City Wire in this report.