Monday, March 28, 2022

Georgia quail hunting dog wagons, a part of the quail hunting tradition that started about 1890-1920, because northerners bought up about 300,000 acres of forest, containing Thomasville in Georgia, and Monticello and Tallahassee in Florida, to hunt bobwhite quail



What Aspen is to skiing, Thomasville, a town of twenty thousand, is to bird shooting. 

By 1897 Harper’s magazine had dubbed Thomasville “the best winter resort on three continents.” Downtown, where the railroad ended, a dozen hotels and twenty-five boardinghouses attracted Northern industrialists and socialites to spend the winter, away from the malaria-plagued Florida coast.

You may find plenty of quail hunting operations scattered across Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and elsewhere, but you will not find the number of properties and the quality of habitat that exist in Thomasville and the surrounding North Florida-Georgia plantation belt. 

Approximately 150 private quail plantations are spread across the Red Hills Region’s 300,000-acres.

Thanks to the highest concentration of well-maintained bird hunting plantations in the South outside of Texas, Thomasville has been able to preserve traditional bird hunting in unrivaled scale and quality.

Authentic Georgia bobwhite quail hunting is exclusively from horseback and mule-drawn wagon.

A hunting party, includes all the support for an afternoon’s hunt — horses, dogs, trailers, mule wagon, huntsman, dog handlers, and wagon driver.

Wagons hold observers, the dogs, extra gear and guns, water for the dogs, additional pointing dogs, one or two retrieving dogs, and refreshments or a full lunch.

https://gardenandgun.com/feature/this-is-quail-country/

  https://blog.wfsu.org/blog-coastal-health/2016/03/quail-hunting-and-accidental-conservation-in-the-red-hills/


Time magazine in 1954 wrote that President Eisenhower boarded a plane for thirty-six-hour getaways to Thomasville, to hunt quail on Milestone Plantation, belonging to then Secretary of the Treasury George Humphrey.


This 1954 photo shows President Dwight D. Eisenhower (center) with his Secretary of Treasury George Humphrey and dog trainer Ruphus Davis after a quail hunt on the Humphrey's Milestone Plantation in Thomasville, Georgia

A LOT of presidents and politicians have been invited to the plantations for bird hunting: https://nydovehunting.weebly.com/our-elected-officials-in-the-field.html


Coca Cola President Robert Woodruff bought Ichauway Plantation in 1929 for use as a 36,000 acre prime bobwhite quail hunting land

Plantations started hitching mules to the hunting dog wagon at the turn of the last century, beginning traditions that became more and more formalized during the 20th century in South Georgia 

generations of the Hanna family have run the Sinkola Plantation, which pioneered quail plantations in the Red Hills Region since the late 1890s.

The side affect of the wealthy plantation/hunting preserves is that the hunting dogs and horses need the best veterinarians, trainers, and supplies.





For a good short video about it, see https://player.vimeo.com/video/384007391 I just don't want to try and learn enough coding tonight to get this sorted out to play on the blog


this post took about 2.5 hours, and is the only look at dog hunting wagons I've ever heard of. Of course there must be a better one out there somewhere, but, in the little time I took to look for, and read about, and then edit a post about - I didn't see any. 

Texas quail hunters use trucks, jeeps, etc that have been modified to be raised platforms, and I covered them in a post years ago  https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2017/03/texas-quail-rigs-there-are-many-and.html

5 comments:

  1. New one on me, thanks.
    I wonder if turpentine and lumber from culled trees were a by product of these plantations.

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  2. Great subject!Great write-up!Thanks.

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    1. Thanks! It's getting really hard to come up with something new, that, as far as I know, no one else is writing about. Jalopnik, Motortrend, Autoblog, Hemmings, etc are going to get most of the news long before I do, and have the time to research a lot more about most stuff... so, when I come across something sorta obscure, but still interesting, I look into it to see if there's something to it that anyone else will find interesting... and traditional dog hunting with mule pulled wagons? Yup. That's obscure. Yet still in the USA

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    2. plus, it adds to the Texas quail car posts.

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  3. Very interesting! It's cool to see the variety of the wagons in the pictures you posted. Each plantation probably started with whatever they had available, and modified them to fit the hunting purpose.

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