42 THE AMERICAN FOXHOUND 



the old school, and had a pack of the common Georgia fox- 

 hounds that were used as negro dogs as well as fox hounds; they 

 could kill a gray fox in two or three hour's race, and gave fine 

 sport. Long before this Mr. George Birdsong and a fox-liunting 

 club at Thomaston, Ga., sent to Virginia and Vermont and 

 bought about forty red foxes, and turned them loose on Pine 

 Mountain, which runs east and west from the Flint River to the 

 Chattahoochee River, seventy-five or a hundred miles. The 

 Civil War stopped fox-hunting in Georgia for six or seven years. 

 This gave time for these foxes to multiply and fill the whole 

 country; they began to branch out over the whole of Middle 

 Georgia. Mr. Harris would occasionally run on one and his 

 pack couldn't even make them take a hole after running two or 

 three packs down in one race. 



Mr. Robertson had the Maryland dogs and had been running 

 them for quite a while; he, it was, that induced Mr. Harris to go 

 to Kentucky with him and see his dogs, also to go to Baltimore 

 with him, then into Howard county, Md., and see the parties 

 that had the hounds and hunt with them a week or two. Mr. 

 Harris went to Kentucky with Mr. Robertson, and tlien they 

 both went to Maryland. There they went hunting with Messrs. 

 Nimrod Gosnell, George W. Linthicum, and John T. Hardey, 

 near Roxbury Mills, in Howard county, also with Mr. A. 

 Winters, at Westminster, in Carroll county. When Mr. Harris 

 left for his home in Georgia, Mr. Gosnell presented him with a 

 pair of pups of this breed. Mr. Harris brought them home, and 

 they were a show to all who went to see them ; they said they 

 were cur dogs. Mr. Harris turned them over to his overseer, Mr. 

 McMillan, to raise. Mr. McMillan raised them, and when they 

 were grown the bitch went into heat, and while tied up in a gin- 

 house, she jumped out through a window and hung herself. Mr. 

 Harris named this pair of dogs June and July. When the dog 

 July was old enough he put him with his pack and went 

 hunting, and when they jumped a red fox, July ran off from the 

 rest of the pack, got the fox to himself, and killed it. This was 

 about the first red fox that Harris' dogs had caught, and the 

 news spread to all the noted hunters in Middle Georgia; they 

 came to see him; they bred to him from all points — George 

 Birdsong of Thomaston, Harvey Dennis of Eatonton, Ward, 

 Kilpatrick, and Hampton Ridley of Jones county, who kept the 

 old dog until his death, and then put a tombstone over his grave 



