Today’s followers of the Blue Ridge Hunt ride over the same rolling country and along the same twists and turns of the Shenandoah River as did George Washington nearly three hundred years ago. While in his late teens and twenties, young George followed the foxhounds of his employer and distant relative, Thomas Fairfax, 6th Lord Fairfax of Cameron.

 

Fairfax had inherited a land grant consisting of the entire Northern Neck of Virginia−some five million acres−between the Potomac and the Rappahannock Rivers. Fairfax moved to the Colonies in the mid-1700s and hired eighteen-year-old George Washington to help survey the north-western reaches of the immense inheritance. Fairfax established himself and his foxhounds at Greenway Court in what is today known as White Post in Clarke County. Washington and Fairfax hunted the native gray foxes from the mid-1700s through those years leading up to the Revolution.

 

The Blue Ridge Hunt was organized by British-born Archibald Bevan in 1888.The period following the Civil War saw numerous Englishmen moving to Virginia. Although there may have been as many reasons as there were Englishmen, one can draw some obvious conclusions. A substantial part of a generation of young Virginia men did not return home from that conflict, and large properties in the Virginia countryside would be inherited by women. There was a vacuum for men, and it would certainly not be filled at that time by American men from the north.

 

Many of the Englishmen who came to Virginia were foxhunters in their native England and were no doubt anxious to organize their sport here along traditional lines. Three of the principal organizers of the Warrenton Hunt were Englishmen as were some of the organizers of the Deep Run Hunt Club of Richmond. Both of those hunts were established in 1887.

 

Archibald Bevan emigrated from West Suffolk in the east of England. He boarded for a time at Carter Hall−built by Lt. Col. Nathaniel Burwell near the village of Millwood in Clarke County after the Revolutionary War−and married Mary Mann Meade, a Burwell descendant born at The Vineyard nearby. Bevan was twenty-nine when he helped establish the Blue Ridge Hunt and was elected Master and huntsman. Bevan’s hunt saddle has long been on display at the Museum of the Clarke County Historical Association in Berryville.

 

By necessity, the hunt started as a drag pack. Wooden rail fencing had disappeared from the countryside, up in the campfire smoke of both armies. Wire fencing had replaced the missing rails, and horsemen of the time could not readily follow hounds across the country on the unpredictable line of a wild fox.

 

To this day, after all these years of hunting history, the gently rolling grasslands of the Shenandoah Valley still echoes to the music of hounds, the huntsman’s horn, and the rhythm of galloping horses. The Blue Ridge Hunt (along with the local churches) remains the oldest and most firmly established institution in Clarke County. As the young, incoming priest was informed upon his arrival at Christ Episcopal Church in 1988 (the hunt’s centennial year) by his long-serving predecessor who was retiring, “A word of caution: do not assume by your appointment to possess leadership stature among your parishioners. You’ll have to share that with Mrs. Greenhalgh, Master of the hounds!”

 

~Norman Fine