SPOTTED DOGS & SPECKLED BIRDS

As quail hunting grew in popularity across the South, one rural Alabama county captured the sporting world's attention and lured the rich and famous to its legendary hunting grounds.

IN HIS 1856 HUNTING MANUAL DOGAND GUN, Johnson J. Hooper devotes several chapters to the age-old sport of hunting quail. "The shooting of game birds, over pointers and setters, has been, time out of mind, the gentleman's amusement," he writes. "So much so, that I would hardly hesitate to make some guess concerning any man's antecedents, who should cross a stubble with me one of these crispy, brown October mornings." Hooper, Alabama's most celebrated antebellum man of letters, was an avid sportsman. He was also a lawyer, journalist, judge, and politician born to a wealthy family, and his passion for hunting quail says something about his privileged station in life.

Though it was not solely a sport for aristocrats, quail hunting in the Old South was a favorite pastime of the wealthy planters and blue bloods who sought to emulate European noblemen with their privileges and refinements. In his book, Hooper devotes considerable attention to choosing the proper gun and ammunition, the proper companions, the proper breed of dog broken by the proper method of training, and so on. To the average Alabamian in the 1850s-who hunted mainly for food or profit, not for sport-the amount of time, money, and gunpowder involved in killing such a small fowl would have seemed extravagant. Only those who could afford to spend their days at leisure could appreciate the time-honored ritual of the quail hunt as Hooper knew it, with all its formalities and traditions.

But it would not be long after Hooper's time before the "gentleman's amusement" evolved into a full-fledged amusement industry in Alabama-and the pedigree of the dog would become far more important than the pedigree of the hunter. The change would occur in the early twentieth century, when the sporting world recognized that some of the best quail hunting, the finest bird dogs, and the greatest bird-dog trainers in the country could be found in east-central Alabama. One county in particular would become synonymous with quail hunting and a prestigious, spectator-sport version of it known as the "field trial," where quail hunters and their dogs would compete to prove their worth. Every fall, the question of who owned the best bird dog in the nation would be hotly contested in the heart of the Black Belt. And enthusiasts, not only from Alabama but from around the country, would gather to witness the spectacle.

THREE ELEMENTS GAME TOGETHER to make Bullock County, Alabama, the Field Trial Capital of the World. The first of these was an intense passion among local farmers for hunting that delicious, wild speckled bird known as the bobwhite quail. The northern bobwhite (Colinus virginianus) is native to much of the eastern United States. It can be found as far north as Massachusetts and the lower reaches of the upper Midwest, as far west as Colorado, and throughout the South. It was the first species of quail encountered by European settlers in this country, as well as the smallest (less than ten and a half inches tall), and the one with the largest geographical range. But unlike most western species of quail, which dwell in remote sage-covered slopes and wild bottomlands far from the nearest human being, the bobwhite sticks relatively close to people. It prefers the weedy grasslands, cultivated fields, and hedgerows typically found around farms. And few places fit the bill better than Bullock County in the early 1900s. With its sprawling cotton plantations and thousands of small farms, this rural neighbor of Montgomery was capable of supporting vast populations of quail. Combined with such abundance of game was a mean annual temperature of a moderate sixty-five degrees, meaning few cold-weather days. Winter in Bullock County was seldom so severe that a person could not stay outside all day. Even in the coldest part of the season, rarely, if ever, did this region see snow.

In such a seasonable climate, with so many quail about, and so many farmers with little to do in the winter, it was inevitable that quail hunting would become a natural part of life in early Bullock County, as it did in other parts of the rural South. It also served as a much-anticipated form of annual entertainment, as an item in the December 6, 1928, edition of the Union Springs Herald suggests: "Those of this community to whom the cold nose of a pointer dog and the shining barrel of a pump gun are the symbols of the utmost in the realm of sports, are hailing with joy the recent opening of the quail season in Alabama." Few Bullock County quail hunters, however, would have been wealthy landowners like Hooper with lofty ideas about their sport. In fact, the majority of them were more likely to be tenant farmers who looked upon their quarry as food, rather than the object of a noble chase. Nevertheless, these local farmers were seized by the same passion for quail as their more affluent counterparts, and in time they gained quite a reputation for the talents and good breeding of their dogs.

Those dogs would turn out to be the second thing that directed the wider world's attention to Bullock County. Wherever it is done, quail hunting relies upon the close, cooperative relationship between humans and dogs. In no other kind of hunting is a good dog so essential. With no dog to locate the quail, one might as well not even try to find them. An untrained dog will not be of much help. But a good dog makes the task rewarding, and a great dog can transform it into something truly graceful, in which the hunter is almost more spectator than participant. The dogs are, in other words, the real main attraction, and all the credit for a good hunt goes to them. Among Bullock County residents, owning a fine bird dog could build a man's reputation almost as quickly as inheriting large sums of money or land. Individuals who owned great bird dogs were widely respected, as were the handlers who trained them. And the only way to know which ones were truly great was to arrange for a competition among them-the field trial.

Although field trialing is modeled on the sport of hunting quail, it has to be understood as a different bird altogether. As an official sport in its own right, the field trial has not been around for long. Begun in the 1870s in England, the first field trial in the U.S. took place in October 1874 near Germantown, Tennessee. In a nutshell, the object of a field trial is to show off a dog's ability to sniff out quail where they are hiding and point them out to a group of handlers and judges. The dogs-typically either English pointers or setters-work in pairs, called "braces." During a field trial, the dogs have only about an hour to show what they can do-and only the very best dogs run in the final of the field trial after participating in elimination trials.

Quail spend most of their time on the ground. To find the birds' scent, the dogs thoroughly and rapidly cover the terrain-"setting fire to the wind" in hunting vernacular-until one of them suddenly stops, its body frozen stiff, on-point. While riding on horseback, the dogs' handlers, judges, officials, and a gallery of spectators follow the dogs. When a dog points, the judges verify the point and the handler dismounts, walks over to the dog, flushes the quail, and shoots blanks into the air to demonstrate the dog's steadiness under the sound of the gun and the flight of the bird. The judges rank the dogs according to their ranging ability, speed, class, style, and handling and steadiness to wing and shot, as well as their bird-finding ability.

FOR NEARLY AS LONG AS FIELD TRIALS have been a sport, Bullock County has been well represented among the prizewinners. In 1905, a dog named Tonopaugh, owned by Union Springs businessman Charlie W. Tway and handled by Jake Bishop, also of Bullock County, carried away the American Field Quail Futurity-one of the first officially sanctioned field trials in the country. Then in 1909, Tway tried his own hand at handling and won the first Southern Club trial at Letohatchee, Alabama, with a dog named Powhatan, the son of Tonopaugh. Powhatan would later follow in his sire's footsteps to win runner-up in the 1910, 1911, and 1913 Amencan Field Quail Futurity contests. In time, other Bullock County dogs-Ariel, Air Pilot's Sam, Doctor Blue Willing, and Tapstick, just to name a few-began winning awards in both local and national contests.

With so many of its own dogs winning titles far and wide, Bullock County began hosting its own field trials. The first one, called the Continental, took place in January 1921 at the Banks Brothers Plantation in Guerryton. Attendance was high, and the following year state senator Thomas S. Frazier convinced the Continental's organizers to move the competition to the county seat, Union Springs. Soon afterwards, the Southern Club also moved its prestigious trial from nearby Lowndes County to Union Springs. With the introduction of these annual contests, field trialing clubs sprang up all across Bullock County. Professional dog trainers set up kennels in Union Springs that cared for purebred English setters and pointers valued at hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. And as the field trials attracted more interest, so too did they attract more people, some from as far away as Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and New York. Banker, manufacturer, and hotelier E. M. Tutwiler of Birmingham was a regular visitor, as was J. P. Dunne, owner of the Baltimore Orioles, and A. G. C. Sage of New York, president of the National Field Trial Club. No longer merely competitions to determine bird dog bragging rights, the field trials of Bullock County grew into major social events where the best of southern hospitality and home-style cooking were on display. As Bullock County resident Queenelle Stone put it, "All the stores had their windows decorated in field trial themes, and everyone took part in some way. The field trials were the Mardi Gras of Union Springs." The contests also provided a venue for the wealthy, and often the not-so-wealthy, to gamble. Some of the high-stakes field trials would see thousands of dollars wagered on both the dogs and the handlers, a fact scarcely acknowledged and never flaunted in this heartland of the Bible Belt.

With all the festivities surrounding the field trials, and with word spreading in sporting circles of the region's prime upland game country, the conditions were right for the appearance of the third and final element that would turn Bullock County's favorite pastime into a stylish, high-society industry. That element was northern money. Around the turn of the twentieth century, wealthy northern industrialists looking for a place to spend the winter began descending on central Alabama and buying up large tracts of land. On these plots they built lavish winter retreats, which they called "plantations" after the manner of their antebellum precursors, and christened them with august-sounding names like Enon, Sehoy, and Sedgefields. Here they spent the winter in comfort and whiled away their days at sport-hunting quail.

One such millionaire was Lewis Bergman (L. B.) Maytag, who had expanded his father's washing machine business into one of the largest corporations in America. When Maytag found his way from Newton, Iowa, to Union Springs in the mid-1920s and saw the natural beauty of the land, the wealth of quail, the local pride in well-trained bird dogs, and the languid lifestyle of the people, he fell in love. "If there is a heaven on earth, it must be in Bullock County, Alabama," he wrote.

Between 1927 and 1929, Maytag bought over twelve thousand acres of land around Union Springs to form a private winter retreat and quail hunter's paradise that he dubbed Sedgefields Plantation. The expansive lodge he built on the premises was a prefabricated building, one of the first of its kind, and was delivered to Sedgefields by train. Behind the lodge sat the children's house, where the Maytag children stayed and received lessons from a private tutor three months out of the year. There were also numerous bedrooms for friends of the family as well as the occasional honorary guest, such as famous crooner Bing Grosby and orchestra leader and actor Phil Harris.

With the increasing number of local field trials, Maytag quickly became an enthusiast. He never tired of watching well-trained bird dogs search for quail, coming to an abrupt halt and freezing like granite statues. He enjoyed seeing a dog's muscles tensed, its tail pointed, its eyes piercing the groundcover in search of quail and its nose locked on the invisible scent of the bobwhite.

Not long after he had established himself in the community, Maytag decided to host his own field trial event. In 1933 he invited the organizers of a local field trial tournament in Fort Davis in neighboring Macon County to hold their next competition at Sedgefields. The organizers agreed, and the field trial at Sedgefields came to be known as the National Amateur Free-For-All. It quickly grew into one of the most prestigious field trial competitions in the country and introduced a new award for dogs, the National Amateur Champion. Other awards included the Maytag Perpetual Trophy, the Sidney Frazier Memorial Trophy, the Birmingham Trophy, and the Maytag Bowl. In 1951 the field trial was sanctioned by American Field-the oldest sporting journal in the country, as well as the acknowledged regulating agency of the field trial world-and became an official stop on the amateur field trialing circuit. Maytag himself eventually went on to become an accomplished handler in his own right, who spared no expense in the breeding and training of his dogs.

In the late twenties and early thirties, because of the Great Depression and the South's changing agriculture, many farmers put their land up for sale at reduced prices and moved to industrialized cities such as Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile. Wealthy northern industrialists, such as the DuPonts and the Klines of Smith, Kline, and Company, followed in Maytag's footsteps and began purchasing land in and around Bullock County as private hunting preserves.

For a brief while Bullock County enjoyed a reputation as a rural playground of the rich and famous. These were the glory days of plantation-style hunting in east-central Alabama, when it was not uncommon to spy movie stars, politicians, famous athletes, and dignitaries from Washington riding side-by-side across a field, or catch a glimpse of Bob Hope driving through Union Springs. These early Depression-era plantations catered to wealthy and well-known visitors, offering them wild quail and eager dogs.

Yet even if comparatively few Bullock County residents were ever invited to hunt with the Maytags or DuPonts or Klines, the plantations did create new jobs. Land managers were needed to burn the fields after quail season to keep undergrowth and trees from taking root. (The burning of fields creates a fertile seedbed for native grasses and shrubs, which in turn provide an ideal habitat for quail.) Stable hands were hired to look after the horses and mules. Carpenters, repairmen, and laborers were needed to keep the homes in peak condition during the off-season. During the fall and winter, cooks, housekeepers, and other attendants saw to the owners' needs. But perhaps the most coveted and prestigious job available was that of dog trainer. Almost every plantation kept a trainer on hand year-round, though the quail season lasted less than half a year, from October to February. And when it came to the specialized work of breeding and training the finest bird dogs in the country, only a Bullock County native would do.

In 1953 William F. Brown, then editor of the sporting journal American Field, had an idea. For some time, field trial enthusiasts had been looking for a way to honor outstanding bird dogs and the various people who had made significant contributions to the field trialing sport over time. Brown's solution was to propose a Field Trial Hall of Fame. He compiled a list of guidelines and regulations that would govern the elections of dogs and prominent individuals to this hypothetical pantheon and published the list in a book, in the anticipation that a hall of fame would one day be established.

He was not disappointed. One year later, in the June 19, 1954, issue of American Field, Brown was pleased to announce that the Field Trial Hall of Fame would be a reality and nominations were being accepted. The hall would be headquartered in Grand Junction, Tennessee, which was also home to the illustrious National Field Trial Championship at historic Ames Plantation. Election to the Hall of Fame was considered to be the sport's highest honor. Dogs could be nominated based on their entire careers up to their death. People, living or dead, were nominated based on their service and the length of time devoted to the sport of field trialing.

The first year to vote for inductees was 1954, and the election committee considered a popular vote of ten dogs and ten persons from the nomination ballot, from which five dogs and five people were eventually elected. In 1955, only two dogs and two people were elected and inducted, one of them-a trainer named Clyde Morton-from Bullock County. Each year since then, two dogs and two people have been inducted into the Field Trial Hall of Fame.

Since the Hall of Fame was created, Bullock County has been honored to have eleven of its citizens inducted, a higher number than anywhere else in the world. With bird dogs and field trials so much a part of its local history and culture, the city of Union Springs saw an opportunity to recognize its hometown stars. In 1996, at the seventy-fifth anniversary of the National Amateur Free-For-All Shooting Dog Championship, Union Springs unveiled a life-size bronze statue of an English pointer topping an eight-foot granite pillar. Located at the intersection of Prairie Street and Hardaway Avenue, the statue bears the names of the eleven Bullock County residents inducted into the Field Trial Hall of Fame: Clyde Morton (1956), Edward Farrior (1956), Jake Bishop (1959), Lewis B. Maytag (1967), Herbert Holmes (1970), George L. Harden Jr. (1973), Robert Wehle (1974), John Rex Gates (1978), Ed Mack Farrior (1982), Harry Bank Sr. (1983), and A. H. "Bill" Hembree Jr. (1985). Today, because of its long list of field trial notables, the city of Union Springs is known as the "Field Trial Capital of the World."

THOUGH QUAIL HUNTING AND FIELD trialing remain a way of life in Bullock County, many of the fields where the rich and famous once rode horseback behind fleet bird dogs are now home to pine trees. The quail, once so abundant, have all but vanished, as has their native habitat. Cattle and pine plantations have replaced the pea patches, gardens, and cornfields, and few of the fencerows that once divided these small farms are still visible. The industrialists have largely moved or sold out, and most of the plantations once owned by northern manufacturing moguls are now owned by Alabamians. The sport itself has also seen some changes. Today, quail hunters primarily hunt pen-raised birds because agricultural practices in Alabama have changed, leaving less habitat for native bobwhite. Nevertheless, the demand for pen-raised bird-hunting is on the rise. Field trials are also becoming increasingly popular. There are more field trials-about four thousand in all-being held in the United States today than ever before. Modern field trial enthusiasts hail from all walks of life, and women participate almost as much as men. But if the demographics have changed, the soul of the sport has not. It is still preserved in the thrill of the chase, the beauty of the land, and the time-honored rituals of a grand old tradition. Nowhere is that tradition more alive than in the Field Trial Capital of the World.

Copyright University of Alabama Press Fall 2004
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