THE MEADOW BROOK 



Meadow Brook. The lease of a farmhouse, situated on the property which 

 the Meadow Brook Hunt now occupies, was secured, and here, on Octo- 

 ber 4th, 1877, was the first meet of the Queen's County hounds. A cir- 

 cular, setting forth the aims and objects of the Hunt, had been sent out, and 

 the subscriptions which came in response to this were very gratifying; so 

 that when Mr. Frank Griswold, who had been elected Master, rode to the 

 meet with a most useful looking pack of about seventeen couples, he was 

 greeted by a large Field, — for those days, — about forty or fifty riders, 

 mounted on every imaginable kind of horse, and by spectators in traps of 

 every sort. 



Everybody was in earnest, and among the names of those who were 

 there that day wall be found many familiar ones in the hunting field of to- 

 day, among them being Messrs. William Jay, Elliot Zborowski, Hermann 

 Oelrichs, Elliot Roosevelt, William E. Peet, John Sanford, William C. 

 Sanford, Dr. James Green, Charles G. Frankhn, Floyd Brice, Frank Payson, 

 Charles G. Peters, Alfred Gardner, H. L. Herbert, and of the ladies. Miss 

 Hildegarde Oelrichs, later Mrs. Henderson ; Mrs Forbes-Morgan, Miss Lucy 

 Oelrichs, later Mrs. William Jay; Miss Lucy Work, now Mrs. Cooper 

 Hewitt, and Mrs. Frank Payson. In the whole Field, there were perhaps 

 half-a-dozen qualified hunters, but no falls were recorded, and most of the 

 Field appear to have finished the run. 



The farmers looked upon what seemed to them an entire novelty with 

 good nature, and even cheerfully replaced the broken rails. Still the Hunt 

 did not escape all opposition, for the Quakers of the neighborhood de- 

 nounced it as a godless employment, and Mr. Henry Bergh, of the Society 

 for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, added his protest, declaring it to 

 be " an evil sport and unnaturally cruel." At the present time, it seems to 

 us, the hunting men of to-day, that the criticisms which the members of the 

 fox-hunting fraternity had to meet were absurd and merely expressions of 

 prejudice ; but we must remember that many prejudices have died in the 

 last thirty years and that opinions which once existed among the Quakers 

 of Long Island have now ceased. Mr. Benjamin D. Hicks, a large land- 

 owner in the heart of the Meadow Brook country, a man of strong convic- 



74 



