Writing, though I enjoy it, doesn’t come easy to me. Mostly due to my appreciation of a good daydream, but also because I find it hard to type without bleeding on the keyboard this time of year. My hands, like the road in front of my house, tend to crack under the stress of the wildly swinging temperatures of early spring in Davidson County, North Carolina. Behind my house sits Cedar Ridge Farm. It belongs to my benefactors, for whom I keep the grounds, manage the hunting, and care for the dogs. In exchange, I’m granted the use of this land to earn a living as a gundog trainer. I reckon such relationships have existed since the earliest days of hunting for sport.
In the not-too-distant past, north Davidson County was a mosaic of forty-acre farms occupied by generations of poor folks scratching a living from the same dirt that now serves my family so well. Over the last four decades, those family farms gave way to vinyl villages, wedding venues, strip malls, and Dollar Generals. Cedar Ridge is a 170-acre island, one of the last modestly large tracts of land between Lexington and High Point.
High Point sits right across the Guilford County line from here, just a shade north of Randolph County. Named for its status as the highest point along the 1856 Charlotte to Goldsboro rail line, at the intersection of the Fayetteville and Western Plank Road, it was a center of commerce and a few decades later, a main port of entry to the agrarian south. During the Gilded Age, our area became a winter home to many of the wealthiest sporting men of the era. Here they could escape the harsh winters of the industrial north and enjoy one of the most fashionable sports of the period, the hunting of quail. In 1894, JP Morgan and Company reorganized the Southern Railroad. Within a few short years this three-county region was dotted in elaborate hunting lodges owned by a generation of Robber Barons. But High Point’s reputation as a bird hunter’s paradise preceded the Southern Railroad by a good many years. These were the earliest days of the dog fancy.
The Eastern Field Trial Club held its first trial in the area in 1887, only the second of which I could find record on the east coast. Registries, stud books, trials and bench shows were just coming into fashion in America and Europe. For the lodges surrounding High Point, competent dog-men and kennels full of champion pointers and setters were the standard. By the turn of the century there were dozens of preserves within a thirty-mile radius of the High Point train station. Cedar Ridge Farm itself resides on ground once leased by the Thomasville and Rich Fork Shooting Clubs.
The first stories I heard regarding northern sportsman of the era were from my grandpa, Charles “Buck” Guyer. Buck was born in 1921 and raised in a Methodist orphanage in High Point. Grandpa loved a Sunday drive and, on such occasions, shared memories of encounters with “gentleman hunters” during his walk to school in neighboring Jamestown. He didn’t know it, but he was likely meeting parties from Clarence H. Mackay’s lodge, then in its waning years. Mackay, born the son of a wealthy silver miner and telegraph mogul, was Chairman of the Board for the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation and President of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company. He leased 30,000 acres of farmland surrounding his elaborate lodge in Jamestown and hired an Englishman from the Scottish border named Edward Armstrong to manage the operation. Armstrong was a gamekeeper and dog-man by heritage and was in the employ of Mr. Mackay for over forty years.
By the time Edward Armstrong arrived to begin development of Mackay’s Lodge and Deep River Kennels, his brother John “Jack” Armstrong had already been here managing a similar operation for financier and railroad magnate, George Jay Gould. Gould’s Preserve sat seven miles south of High Point in Randolph County. Jack Armstrong managed tens of thousands of acres of leased land and kept the dogs under Gould’s kennel name, Furlough. Furlough and Deep River dogs were fixtures on the podiums of the eastern trials through the aughts and into the teens of the last century. The Gould sporting preserve outlived the man himself. Upon Gould’s death in 1923, Buffalo, NY businessman Commodore Frank B. Hower purchased the kennels, caretakers’ home, and lodge along with 1700 acres of surrounding property.
Commodore Hower’s manager and trainer was a well-known dog-man by the name of Dewey English, born of a prominent family of dog trainers and sportsmen from neighboring Archdale, NC. Hower had immense admiration for Dewey and left him a handsome inheritance in October of 1932. Most of the land, to include the kennel operation, was purchased by J.E. Millis, a prominent hosiery mill owner from High Point, NC.The preserve was renamed Millbrook Farm and remains the country home of the Millis and Covington families to this day. Dewey English stayed on the property, training for the public under the Furlough name until the 1950’s. In his time as a professional trainer, he built and maintained a deep string of champion pointers and setters, most notably, Hall of Fame Setter and 1939 National Champion, Sport’s Peerless Pride.
Dewey English took on a protege by the name of Arthur Bean. Mr. Bean was a pioneering trainer and handler on the shooting dog circuit, having won the second running of the National Open Shooting Dog Championship in 1962 with McCaskill's Mr. Ranger. He was friends with Bob Wehle of Elhew Kennels fame and is said to have had some influence on Wehle’s popular training book, Wing and Shot. Bean and his partner, Frank Maness, kept two separate strings of dogs at his Fairfield Kennels near the old Gould preserve. Bean ran dogs in trials while Maness focused on gundogs for the public. They collaborated until Bean’s retirement in the mid 1970’s. Though Arthur had officially retired he continued to trial and help folks with their dogs into the 1980s. Many successful trialers of the modern era consider Arthur Bean a major influence.
Prior to the Great Depression, there were arguably more bird dog kennels and dog trainers within thirty miles of High Point than anywhere else in the world, but October 29, 1929 signaled the end of the age of the lavish Piedmont quail preserves. Bobwhite quail continued to thrive for a few decades, but eventually dwindled to non-huntable numbers. Dogs and dog-men followed suit. By the turn of the 21st century, this part of our heritage was pretty well lost to history.
Today, save a small remnant population of opulent plantations at the confluence of Georgia, Florida, and Alabama, southern quail culture struggles to hold on. All we can do is exist in our time. We hunt different birds, in different landscapes, with different dogs. We travel to less congested corners of this country in search of what was once our birthright. We lament fescue and fire ants and retired civil servants from states with a higher cost of living. Mostly, we long for a time we never knew and a lifestyle we would have likely never known.
Authors note:
While researching material for this article I was frustrated by my inability to draw a connection between John Armstrong and Dewey English. This leaves the trainers’ lineage I was hoping to demonstrate somewhat incomplete. I spent far more time than intended pouring over regional newspaper archives, before landing on a brief story from the Burlington State Dispatch dated March 26th, 1913, regarding the murder of John Armstrong by the manager of Archdale Shooting Club, Mr. Lert English.
About the Author
Grayson Guyer grew up in North Carolina around bird dogs and dog men. He operates Lost Highway Kennels at Cedar Ridge Farm in Davidson County, NC. When not choring or training dogs Grayson can often be found on the bank of a pond with his little boy, a 2wt fly-rod, a Zebco Spiderman combo, and a stringer full of Bluegill.
