Excerpt from Fox Hunting in America

Fox hunting in America, as well as in Great Britain, had its beginning around the year 1700. In England long before that time, and indeed as early as 1611, the fox was hunted by the farmer and the petty squire, but the pursuit was really sport and was treated with great contempt by the sportsmen of those days, who held that stag hounds gave royal recreation and that the chase of the hare came next in importance. In America, however (and when I say America, I speak of the colonies of Virginia and Maryland for those early days), the sport of hunting any animal with hounds cannot very well have taken place until the end of the seventeenth century (1690) for the reason that the first settlements were upon the banks of streams, and for many years thereafter there were no fields over which hounds could run and, indeed, the settlers possessed neither hounds nor horses, even if the country had been adapted to hunting.

The colony in Virginia, founded at Jamestown in 1607, was almost swept away by the great massacre in 1622, and for a year thereafter the colonists lived within stockades. never daring to wander beyond sight of a primitive fort. There is no record that fox hounds existed in the colony at that time and, indeed, the records of the Virginia Company from 1619 to 1624 contained no mention of foxes, or hounds, or of hunting.

In Maryland, where the first settlement was founded at St. Mary's, near the present site of Annapolis, in 1634, the same state of affairs existed, and it seems, therefore, hardly probable that the statement made in Outing of October, 1897, by Mr. Hanson Hiss, in his very interesting article. "The Beginning of Fox Hunting in America," to the effect that in Queen Anne County the first fox hunt in America took place in the year 1650, is correct.

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