OTTIS S. CARROLL

                  Ottis S. Carroll was born January 3, 1903 in Turkey, North Carolina. He attended Trinity Park College, now a part of Duke University, and later Wingate College where he participated in athletics. Following college, he married Gladys Laney whom he had met at Wingate and they returned to Sampson County where he started farming. In 1939 he and a partner leased a grist mill in Sampson County. At the expiration of the lease in 1941, he and his partner built a new mill in Turkey and continued to produce corn meal and flour. The byproducts from the mill were fed to hogs and cattle. Mr. Carroll later purchased his partner’s share in the mill and in 1946 started producing custom-mixed feed for livestock and poultry. The company also increased the number of livestock they were feeding at the time. He entered the poultry business in 1953 by constructing eleven broiler houses to grow broilers for local processors. The broiler operation was gradually expanded through contract growers.

In 1967 the business had grown to the point that a chief operating officer was needed for the company. Fifty percent of the stock of Carroll’s mill was sold to the new manager. The company continued its rapid growth and converted the broiler operation into turkeys, expanded the swine operation to include the production of feeder pigs, and the name of the organization was changed to Carroll’s of Warsaw, Inc.  Both the poultry and swine division experienced phenomenal growth during the next decade. The broiler industry was reentered in 1979 and at Mr. Carroll’s death in 1981, the company was producing approximately six million turkeys, sixteen million broilers, one hundred eighty thousand market hogs, and employed over five hundred people.

Mr. Carroll was a true entrepreneur and pioneer developing the North Carolina poultry industry and the North Carolina Poultry Federation is extremely pleased to honor him by induction in the North Carolina Poultry Hall of Fame.