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Bless Our Hounds – Februray Issue PineStraw Magazine
Filed Under (General Interest, The Area) by admin on 02-02-2012
Article from this month’s issue in PineStraw Magazine
The Boyd family began foxhunting in the Sandhills nearly a century ago. Luckily, the tradition endures
By Maureen Clark
When the sound of the hunt horn rings through Weymouth Woods this February, hounds, horses and riders will be gathering to honor the heritage of the Moore County Hounds. Almost a hundred years ago, in 1914, James Boyd began hunt- ing the pinewoods and farmland surrounding his country estate in Southern Pines. The women rode sidesaddle, and the young Boyd was a soldier newly home from service on battlefields of Italy and France. In the years between the two World Wars, foxhunting flourished in the Sandhills. Boyd’s brother Jackson joined him as Joint Master. Together they hunted three times a week, from November through February, for almost 30 years. Nearby hunts in Pinehurst and at Overhills, the Rockefeller compound near Spring Lake, were active. Today, the Moore County Hounds hunt is the oldest registered hunt in North Carolina and the lone local survivor carrying on the Boyd tradition.
The founders of the Moore County Hounds deserve to be credited with the hunt’s longevity. Unlike the Rockefellers, who built an elaborate hunt facility housed in a very private and isolated compound, the Boyds tied their hunt to the community. It was their way of connecting with friends, neighbors and visitors to the Sandhills. Although James Boyd had been introduced to foxhunting in the aristocratic English countryside, he decided to adopt a different tone for Weymouth. His description of a 1916 New Year’s Day hunt captures, with good-hearted wit, the experience of hunting with local farmers.
We laid hounds on and off we went. When we struck the first fence it sounded like the collapse of the Crystal Palace. I looked back, and there was a cloud of smoke and flying timbers. When the air cleared, the fence was gone, but all the field were on the right side and riding to beat hell.
When he wasn’t foxhunting, James Boyd was a promi- nent writer who published a number of well-researched his- torical novels, many set in North Carolina. He was part of Scribner editor William Maxwell Evarts (“Max”) Perkins’ group of writers, which included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Boyd wrote from a standing desk in the second- floor, paneled library overlooking the kennels. Writing for Southern Pines Magazine in 1924, he addressed the expense of foxhunting, with characteristic humor and honesty.
It would not only be simpler to say that people hunt for fun; that they squander money, catch cold, desert their wives, break their necks, get robbed by dealers, wear tight boots in the cold weather … it would not only be simpler to say this, it would also do more honor to the sport.
Boyd could also touch more seriously on the timeless lure of foxhunting as he did in an introduction to Anthony Trollope’s Hunting Sketches in 1933.
The feel of a horse’s lifting shoulders, the swing of hounds across the grass, the sweep of a hunting country. … These things are among the beauties of this earth; and they are reinforced by a thousand minor joys … by the quality of leather and melton and cord, by soft late-August daybreaks and hard, bright morn- ings of November …
The Boyds’ love of foxhunting was coupled with pragmatism and vision. The family realized early that the future of the sport depended on having enough land on which to hunt. Accordingly, four members of the Boyd family and several friends formed a company that purchased 2,300 acres in Manly several weeks before the crash of the stock market in 1929, says research done by Dominick Pagnotta for the Walthour- Moss Foundation.
And the legacy lived on. In 1942, two years before James Boyd’s death, the hounds were given to Ginnie and Pappy Moss. The Mosses built new kennels on their farm, Mile-A-Way, in Manly, a mile down May Street from Weymouth. Before Pappy Moss died in 1976, the Walthour-Moss Foundation was established, a land trust that has amassed 4,200 acres. Cameron Sadler, great niece of Ginnie Moss (who died six years ago), is now one of the Moore County Hounds’ four Joint Masters, and an heir in spirit to the Boyd legacy.
Cameron, like her great aunt, grew up in Savannah but came to Southern Pines to fox hunt as soon as she and her sister could sit their ponies. While Cameron’s foxhunting began in Moore County, her job with Kraft Foods, currently as regional vice president of sales, has occasioned eleven different moves.
Cameron, who now lives in Southern Pines and com- mutes to Charlotte, took advantage of her relocations to ride with a variety of hunts. The first association was with the Shake Rag hunt in Atlanta. “Aunt Ginnie gave me a horse [named] Remember Page to hunt there,” Cameron recalls. She has gone on to ride, as a guest, with over 50 hunts on the East Coast, across the United States, in Ireland, England, France, New Zealand and Australia. Cameron is married to Lincoln Sadler, a wildlife biologist who works at the Sandhills Gamelands in Hoffman. He is the grandson of Verdie Caddell, a beloved horsewoman who taught several generations of youngsters to ride at her Southern Pines stable. Lincoln has whipped in for the hunt for years.
Like the Boyds, Cameron understands the importance of the Moore County Hounds’ ties to the community. She welcomes opportunities to speak to clubs and civic groups about foxhunt- ing. She is thrilled with the crowds that throng Youngs Road for the annual Blessing of the Hounds. A treasured document in her home is the Declaration of the Town of Southern Pines, signed by Mayor Norris Hodgkins in 1960 citing:
The Hunt has continued for fifty years and during that time brought pleasure and recreation to the many citizens of the Sandhills.
The recent overwhelming turnout of the community to protect the foundation’s land from a N.C. Department of Transportation project speaks to the strength of to the community relations established by the Boyds.
In Cameron’s opinion, the greatest challenge facing hunts across the country is the loss of hunt land. In that regard, the Walthour-Moss Foundation’s 4,200 acres located primarily within the boundaries of Youngs Road and north of Lake Bay Road make Moore County unique on the East Coast. Indeed, the Boyd’s planning in the 1920s was prescient.
Cameron also notes the changes in the riders foxhunting now as opposed to the early fields. “We want to be considerate of who is hunting and find a positive way for people to enjoy rid- ing,” she observes. “There is a wider variety of ability and knowledge now, with some who start riding at 40 or later. Like the Virginia hunts out- side Washington, we have a lot who commute to hunt here.” In the early days, many of the homes around Weymouth had stables. The Campbell House, the home of Jackson Boyd, had a stable, as did Loblolly up the road. Horses were a part of the landscape and many children grew up riding. As late as the 1960s there was a horse stabled next to Southern Pines Elementary School on Massachusetts Avenue.
Like the composition of the riders who fol- low the hounds, the quarry has changed. The native quarry has always been the gray fox, with a smaller population of the larger red fox intro- duced to the Sandhills. According to Cameron, “Coyote is our predominant prey now. In 1940, coyote territory was a slim band of the western United States. Now they are found in every state except Hawaii. They are bigger, faster and more adaptable than foxes.”
Locally, the hunt has responded to the shift by organizing the field accordingly. The first flight follows the faster paced coyote closely. A middle flight maintains the pace and jumps more selectively. The last group, hill toppers, follows without jumping. “They (the coyote) seem to be very game,” Cameron explains. “ I saw one (coyote) sit and wait, unworried, for the hounds to catch up before he took off again.”
The terrain is also altered. When James and Jackson Boyd struck out with hounds, the fields were open, the longleaf stands clear cut, and farmland was plentiful. The brothers could visu- ally locate the pack. Hounds were not threatened by traffic. Today, the trees have grown and the hunting is predominantly “woods” hunting where the voice of the hounds is important, and the so-called “biddability” of the hounds — their obedience to the huntsman’s direction — is desirable.
In a portrait of the pack that hangs in Cameron’s home, painted by the wife of Will Stratton, the Boyds’ huntsman, Cameron points out the mixture of hounds depicted: “There are two Orange County hounds, three English hounds, a crossbred and a Penn Marydel in the pack.” This month, Moore County Hounds’ huntsman David Raley will hunt a pack that is largely Penn Marydel, a long-eared hound known for a strong, braying voice. On February 18th, the Moore County Hounds will come from the kennel at Mile-A-Way, up Sheldon Road, across Youngs Road and up Ridge Street to the north gate of Weymouth. They will meet the field of riders in the large meadow of the Weymouth Woods state park east of the estate. The Friends of Weymouth, Joint Masters Dick Webb, Effie Ellis, Mike Russell, Cameron Sadler and hunt secretary Ginny Thomasson invite the community, in the tradi- tion of the Moore County Hounds, to be a part of honoring the Boyd family and the Southern Pines heritage of foxhunting on grounds of Weymouth beginning at 8:30 a.m. Carriages representing the driving community will join the celebration. The hounds go off at 9 a.m.
