Hunting & Home in the Southern Heartland: The Best of Archibald Rutledge

By Jim Casada and Archibald Rutledge

Archibald Rutledge ranks as one of America's best-loved outdoor writers. Throughout his long, productive career he lived close to the land and had a rare knack for capturing on paper the joys of hunting, the beauty of the outdoors, and the camaraderie which lies at the heart of the sporting experience. Rutledge was a staunch son of the Southern soil, and he wrote with effective feeling of the virtues that region has always prized—honor, love of one's family, self-respect, and honesty. This volume is the first in a trilogy which will once again make available Rutledge's finest prose work. Casada, a long-time student and admirer of Rutledge, has chosen thirty-five stories which represent Rutledge at his best. To enter the world of this masterful storyteller is to share the pleasure he brought to legions of admiring readers during his lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: May 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643361321

Archibald Rutledge

Archibald Rutledge (1883–1973) was South Carolina’s most prolific writer and the state’s first poet laureate. His nature writings garnered him the prestigious John Burroughs Medal.

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Introduction

Archibald Rutledge:

Sweet Southern Scribe

No one has sung the South’s sporting song with the same alluring sweetness as Archibald Rutledge. A proud son of the Southern soil, with roots reaching deep into the Carolina Low Country’s past, he was a man born to love nature. Rutledge ranks as one of America’s most popular and prolific outdoor writers. His lengthy, multifaceted career was that of a Renaissance man, and the primary purpose of this book is to make some of his sparkling literary achievements available to the public once again.

Rutledge was born at the family’s Summer Place in McClellanville, South Carolina, on October 23, 1883. If one judges from the contents of several of his books, his was an idyllic childhood. During most of the year the family lived at their ancestral home, Hampton Plantation. Annually though, when mosquitoes, humidity, and the dog days of late summer made life unbearable and malaria a real risk, they would beat a temporary retreat to the Summer Place or to the North Carolina mountains in search of comfort.

The line from which Archibald Rutledge was descended was a long and proud one. His ancestors included a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and a South Carolina governor. His father, Henry Middleton Rutledge, was the youngest Confederate soldier to attain the rank of colonel in the Civil War, while his mother, neé Margaret Hamilton, was a lady possessed of all the finest attributes of Southern womanhood. Rutledge pays a moving tribute to his parents in My Colonel and His Lady (1937).

Rutledge’s halcyon days of youth at Hampton came to an abrupt end when he reached his teenage years. When local educational opportunities could no longer meet the precocious lad’s needs, in 1896 he departed Hampton to enroll at Charleston’s Porter Military Academy. Four years later, although younger than most of his compatriots, he graduated as class salutatorian. His outstanding academic performance earned him medals in, among other subjects, French and English. His prowess in these fields suggests that even at this juncture there were signs of a writer in the making. Much later he would recall, with a pardonable degree of self-satisfaction, his graduation awards: It pleased me to have gathered enough gold and silver medals to survive a depression. His overall achievements earned him a prestigious Lorillard Scholarship to attend Union College in Schnectady, New York.

For a son of the South this period far from home must have been exceedingly difficult, although he later wrote: During my four years at Union, I met only a single person, from the highest to the lowest, who was not gentle and courteous. That sole exception was a heartless fellow student who threw a letter from Rutledge’s mother into a mud puddle. An altercation ensued in which Rutledge’s nose was broken. For the rest of his life his nose, which mended at a bit of an angle, bore vivid testimony to the way he defended a trivial insult to family honor.

Constant homesickness and this one incident aside, his college years were good ones. He was devoted to academic excellence despite grinding loneliness which was never completely dispelled until finally, many years later, he returned home to Hampton for good. He completed his studies for a bachelor’s degree at Union College in the standard four years, graduating with honors in 1904. The honors were but a small part of what he accomplished, academically and otherwise, in college. His days and nights were filled with frenetic activity, establishing a work ethic that endured all his life.

Rutledge was an outstanding member of the Union track team, and his native wit and eloquence made him a powerful orator. Along with excelling in his studies and extracurricular activities, Rutledge showed a rare talent for making friends. This was a characteristic which he would carry with him throughout his life. Perhaps drawn by his innocence and transparent goodness, several professors took the bright-eyed, intelligent young man under protective wings. During the summers of his college years he worked for General Electric, and while so employed he came under the influence of that company’s head, Charles Steinmetz.

Rutledge described Steinmetz as an elemental genius; the two became fast friends. Through Steinmetz’s good offices he met a number of famous men—Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, George Westinghouse, and John Burroughs. The last, perhaps the greatest naturalist of his day and certainly a man with rare gifts for communicating the outdoor world, made a deep impression on the young man. Many years later, when Rutledge won the John Burroughs Medal for his natural history writing, he must have looked back on the glad occasion of their initial meeting with warm reflection.

Shortly after his graduation from Union, Rutledge accepted what supposedly was an interim position teaching English at Pennsylvania’s Mercersburg Academy. He was still shy of his twenty-first birthday, and when the wife of William Mann Irvine, the headmaster, met him, she unthinkingly blurted out: He will never do—he’s too young. As matters turned out, Mrs. Irvine’s snap judgment proved inaccurate on several scores. The temporary post launched a teaching career at Mercersburg which stretched over the next thirty-three years. Moreover, in 1907 the young man who had been greeted with such skepticism married Florence Louise Hart, Mrs. Irvine’s younger sister. Florence Hart was a lovely Southern belle who, as a published poet, shared her husband’s literary interests and made him an ideal helpmate for the twenty-seven years they were together.

Those busy, bustling years at Mercersburg were in many ways filled with joy. The three sons to whom the present work is dedicated were born, and from all accounts Rutledge proved a masterful, immensely popular teacher. In fact, most of the Hampton bucks he killed over the years fell to a cherished Parker double-barrel shotgun which was a gift from admiring students. Nonetheless, Hampton Plantation remained constantly in Rutledge’s thoughts, and regular visits to the place of his roots marked Christmases and summer holidays. Particularly after the deaths of his parents in the 1920s, each return renewed Rutledge’s vision of the day when he could again truly call Hampton home.

Meanwhile, he wrote in every spare moment. Necessity was one impulse underlying this literary outpouring, for a growing family and the dream of a restored Hampton posed financial demands which far outstripped his salary. The key to his productivity, however, lay in the fact that the muse which moved deep within him was the single most important motivating factor in his life.

Eventually his poems and magazine pieces would number in the thousands, and in collected form they constitute the basis for all but a handful of the books, more than fifty in all, which he published during his lifetime. In time, Rutledge’s literary endeavors earned him considerable renown. By the conclusion of World War I he was already well on his way to becoming a nationally recognized writer on natural history, outdoor sports, and the South’s way of life. At an early stage in his literary career he began winning prizes in essay and story contests, and from the 1920s on honors were bestowed on him with great regularity. In the course of his career Rutledge would be awarded at least a dozen honorary degrees and was elected to membership in the American Society of Arts and Letters.

A real watershed in Rutledge’s literary career came when he was named South Carolina’s first poet laureate in 1934. At this juncture he began thinking seriously about a permanent return to the Palmetto State and getting on with the massive project of restoring Hampton Plantation to the glories of bygone days. Several factors coalesced to strengthen his resolve in this regard. The death of his first wife in 1934 turned his thoughts even more longingly toward Hampton, as did his subsequent marriage, in 1936, to a childhood sweetheart, Alice Lucas. Then too, his three sons had all reached manhood, and their departure from home eased the financial burden which a return to Hampton would involve.

Still, the move back to Hampton in 1937, coming as it did while the Depression held the country in its deadly grasp, was a daring one. There would be a small stipend coming to Rutledge as state poet laureate, and presumably he had accumulated some retirement benefits during his years of teaching. He could also count on royalties from his books, and the post-Pennsylvania years would see no noticeable abatement in the appearance of new books and the articles from which they were shaped. Still, it took strong resolve to retire from Mercersburg and make that final pilgrimage back to Hampton.

Rutledge spent most of what remained of his life, save for a period in his final years when poor health saw him move to Spartanburg to live with a sister, at Hampton. There he wrote, supervised the restoration of the plantation home (which dated back to the mid-eighteenth century) and its grounds, hunted, hosted countless visitors, and lived to the hilt the life of a Southern squire.

It was a portion of Rutledge’s life which had plenty of gladness, but there was sadness too. Prince Alston, his beloved black friend who had been a constant companion in childhood and always the first to greet him when he returned to Hampton, had died. So too were many of the other henchmen to whom he frequently pays tribute in his work.

Indeed, in speaking of Rutledge and his black friends, it is important to recognize that modern sensibilities may be offended by the manner in which he writes of the blacks who were such a prominent part of life at Hampton Plantation. We live, however, in different times, and to judge the mores of the past from the perspective of the present is unfair. For those who might be inclined to condemn Rutledge on this score, some of his words from God’s Children (1947) are worth pondering:

Of what America will be in the days to come, and of what the Negro will be, I have no knowledge. Tomorrow in tremendous night reposes. I only know that the strength and beauty and glory of our country as we know it today have been in part due to a race originating in the Dark Continent, long held in slavery and now free to work out its own destiny. Its past has many flowing, if humble pages. If its future, with its superior opportunities, shall achieve even as much as its past did with its severe limitations, there will be made to our nation’s history an inestimable contribution.

To Rutledge, blacks were part of an extended plantation family. The old huntermen taught him well the ways of wild creatures, opening up before him the pages of nature’s gigantic green book, and he felt a debt of gratitude to them which he expressed time and again in his writing. And Prince Alston was his closest friend. He called Prince A Comrade to My Heart and wrote that he brought to my heart a peace the world could not give.

The loss of Prince deeply saddened Rutledge, and after his return to Hampton, other cherished aspects of his earlier years faded away. Even the glories of the Hampton Hunt, which Irvine Rutledge has poignantly described as a period of twenty shining years, came to a premature end. Middleton Rutledge was killed in a traffic accident in 1943, and at the same time the winds of World War II carried young Archibald and Irvine Rutledge to duty overseas. Even after the conflict was over, with one member of the inseparable quartet gone the Hampton Hunt’s postwar years were not the same.

Yet each day brought its bright moments, many of them centering on the pilgrimages Rutledge’s readers made to Hampton. There they were ever assured of a warm welcome. Similarly, the daily mail brought letters from admirers, always faithfully answered. For exercise, there was the pleasure that a ramble about Hampton’s grounds provided. Schoolchildren came to admire South Carolina’s gentle patriarch of letters, there were still members of the Alston clan willing to share a hearty laugh or drop whatever was in hand for a hunt, and memories of the past were there to provide comfort in the present.

As Rutledge eased into octogenarian status the years began to take a physical toll, but the fires which fueled him as a writer still burned brightly. As late as 1970 one of his finest books, The Woods and Wild Things I Remember, was published. That same year also witnessed an event which gave Rutledge great pleasure while assuring the preservation of his beloved Hampton. He sold Hampton Plantation to the state of South Carolina with the stipulation that the home and grounds be maintained and open to the general public. In a touching indication of how much Prince Alston had meant to his life, the agreement also specified that members of the Alston family were to be employed as staff as long as they desired.

Three years later, on September 15, 1973, just five weeks shy of his ninetieth birthday, Rutledge died. Fittingly, the end came at the Summer Place in McClellanville where he had been born, thus completing the full circle of his life in a fashion one can only admire and envy. The sweet Southern scribe who was Archibald Rutledge now belongs to that world we have lost. Yet he still enriches us with the music and magic of his words, and the sedate, stately columns of Hampton still stand to form a tangible link with the past. The enduring wisdom of his words and his evocation of all that was good about the plantation way of life are Rutledge’s gifts to posterity. All who love beautifully crafted literature and Southern tradition should be grateful for his legacy.

PART I

FAMILY AND FRIENDS

Archibald Rutledge was a sociable soul, a man blessed with an exceptional gift for cherishing the companionship of both family and an ever-widening circle of friends. In his later years he welcomed all and sundry to Hampton, genially embracing them as an extended family. Throughout his long life he also conducted a voluminous correspondence, and even after his fame brought him a flowing, growing stream of letters, he faithfully replied to all who wrote him. It was typical of the man’s generous nature that, once he had achieved some degree of renown, he had small cards printed with several of his favorite poems. He would send these to admirers, usually with a personal message, and any schoolchild (or class) who contacted him could count on being so favored. One can only marvel at how he kept abreast of his correspondence and still found time to write his stories and articles. What was even more striking about Rutledge’s gregariousness and sense of familial closeness, however, was his ability to breathe life into personal experiences in a fashion which makes the reader feel almost like kinfolks. To join him, even vicariously, is to know something of that hospitable aura which typified Low Country Carolina of his day.

Reading books which focus on Rutledge’s adolescence, most notably My Colonel and His Lady (1937) and Tom and I on the Old Plantation (1918), rapidly leads to realization that in many ways his lifelong love of camaraderie was rooted in an idyllic childhood. Wherever his career carried him, to Porter Military Academy in Charleston, Union College in New York, better than three decades at Pennsylvania’s Mercersburg Academy, and finally full circle to the beloved environs of Hampton Plantation, there was fellowship and togetherness.

Rutledge is probably best remembered as a writer on nature and outdoor subjects, but many of his most appealing stories deal with family and friends. The best of these pieces are redolent of hearth and home—they set imagination’s senses free with savory smells of country cooking, the warmth and welcome of a cheery hardwood fire ablaze, and the sounds of joyful reunion. In these tales the compassion and caring which were salient characteristics of the man shine through. His was a special ability to carry readers, employing simple yet moving scenarios, into his memory’s rich storehouse.

In the selections which follow we join Rutledge as he shares hallowed memories—of holidays, festive occasions, and other special moments. In a warm, winsome fashion he resurrects a world we have largely lost. To accompany him into that world, traveling darkening yet delightful roads at a leisurely pace, is to understand something of the qualities he treasured in life. As we follow his literary footsteps we come to know him as a boy and as a man. And, thanks to the magnetism of his words, the magic of his world, and the mesmerism of his character, we are captivated.

My Colonel

He lives on one of the great rice plantations that lie along the Santee River in the coast country of South Carolina. His home was the headquarters of the Swamp Fox, the dauntless Francis Marion. On his visit to the far South, after the Revolution, the first gentleman in America, Gen. George Washington, breakfasted there. It has been the home of one of the most famous of Colonial Governors, and a second home to two signers of the Declaration. The noble old house itself looks like history. It has that alien yet generous majesty that is indefinably associated with the traditions of refinement. And because of this same spirit, which is in perfect harmony with the temper of its master, its hospitable doors are open wide to all comers. The old stage coach road from Charleston to Georgetown runs through the plantation; and even of late years, when travel on that route has been infrequent, my Colonel’s old home has given welcome and shelter to half a score of belated travelers at one time. It has been known to have gathered under its kindly roof during a single evening such a list as this: a horse doctor, a wandering spiritualist, a bishop, a whiskey drummer, a Presbyterian minister of the old school, an insurance agent, and a bibulous hunter. (No sequence is followed in this list save that which its very incongruity suggests.) And all of these my Colonel delights to entertain.

That he is six feet tall; that one shoulder droops because of two wounds, one from Malvern Hill and one from Gettysburg; that his head is regal in its carriage, with its thin aquiline nose, its eyes the color of the blue morning sky, its strong and tender mouth, half hidden under the heavy white mustache; that the cast of his countenance is noble and proud—all these are in a way descriptive; but it is by suggestion that you come to know the real character of the man.

Every Negro in the county knows and loves my Colonel. In his dealings with them he is not as other men; he is unique and picturesque to a high degree. At eight o’clock in the morning he will exhaust his nerves and his expletives on the old reprobate, Wash Green. (Once a year, when he votes, he is known by his full name: George Washington Alexander Burnsides Green.) He will stalk back and forth in a black rage, cursing the stupidity of the ragged Negro who stands the fire well, and who keeps a cunning and humble silence. He will pause anon to pull a flower and to look over his beloved river and pine woods, while his eyes soften momentarily and his face is illumined by tender memories. But his reverie is as short as it is romantic. With double vehemence he descends on the lazy miscreant; then finally he will stride into the house, fumble in the harness-room over old buckles and broken chains, in the hall over tattered gloves and an outworn rifle, wondering the while, with growing contrition, whether he has not been too hard on poor Wash. At length he will be drawn—and it is chivalric to consider this appeal involuntary—to the great mahogany sideboard in the dining-room. Here he takes what he calls a precaution. (Sometimes he styles it a mild interjection.) This he accompanies with a silent toast: perchance to some visionary memory, perchance to some fair lost face out of the haunted past that lives in his heart. Then he will stretch himself in the huge arm-chair, where the Swamp Fox once dozed, and soon will be deep in a cherished copy of Kipling—the only modern poet with whom he is familiar, although he used to be thoroughly versed in the works of Burns, Byron, and Tennyson. He reads Fuzzy Wuzzy, Gunga Din, and the Recessional. He knows this last by heart, and he cannot sit still under its powerful influence. So he walks out on the front piazza and down the steps, chanting the solemn and tremendous lines. There, under a big live-oak, with its gray, sighing banners of moss, he comes abruptly upon Wash Green, who has been biding his time. And now, indeed, the former things are passed away. For an hour they stand under the great oak and talk of the old times (being oblivious of the immediate and painful past). Then my Colonel, with a certain air of mystery about him, goes back into the house. Presently he reappears with his arm full of plunder. On closer inspection this would be seen to consist of a coat, two shirts, an old pair of leggins, and a plug of tobacco. His exit from the doorway is made somewhat surreptitiously, for more practical members of the family are apt to keep a hard eye on his generosity. But he reaches Wash in safety, and bestows his gifts with the old love in his eyes.

W’ere iz I gwine see my Boss again? queries Wash as he turns to go.

My Colonel’s answer is a singular one; with the face of one reading the commination service he holds his right arm horizontal, with the thumb pointing dismally downward. Wash comprehends, and is convulsed; and as he crosses the field he breaks into shouts of laughter. Meanwhile, his master, humming happily the chorus of a love song, popular long before the War, returns to the dining-room and takes a double precaution.

As it is with Wash, so it is with all the Negroes. My Colonel knows by name, character, parentage and proclivities every little pickaninny on the nearby plantations. And as a rule they make splendid pigmy workmen. One of my Colonel’s right-hand men is Three Cents, who is only eight years old. His mother called him that the day he was born. Caze, she said, with more justice than mercy, he made such a po’ showin’. Another one of his diminutive protégés is Monk. After this fashion he got his name: his mother, casting about vainly for something to call him, was at length persuaded to wait until some marked proclivity of her child should give her a clue as to an appropriate appellation. When he was three years old he began to practise prehensile traits with his toes; he picked switches with them, and in climbing used them with remarkable skill; whereupon he was promptly christened Monk.

My Colonel is a lover of wild flowers; and the Santee woods are a paradise for them. On every hand in my Colonel’s country Nature is riotous with her beauty and abundance. She is eager to retake what man has abandoned; and one by one the great plantations are falling to decay and desolation. Well she knows how to clothe a ruin, how to veil a cemetery, how to drape a tomb. And in this sweet silent land her flowers make lovely what were otherwise touched with the sadness of spiritual loneliness and pain. Yet, of these subconscious elements, my Colonel is hardly aware. He rides into the bay-branch and breaks a great fragrant cluster of snowy blooms for his wife; he reins in his horse to watch the humming birds at work and play; and he drenches his soul in the beauty of the pines, of the flowering thickets, and of the tender radiance of the blossoming fields. Of the flowers in the garden, he loves the red rose best; for half a centry ago his mother used to wear one in her hair. He even went so far in sentiment once as to write a little verse about a red rose; but he never showed it to any one, having always a deep regard for the sanctity of personal emotions.

My Colonel is the truest sportsman in the world. It is fifteen years since his youngest son, then but twelve years old, was so forgetful of his breeding one day as to shoot a quail on the ground. And to this hour his father cannot think of the incident without a profound feeling that the family has suffered shame and disgrace. One summer a neighboring rice planter shot a doe that had been destroying his pea field. Two days later a Negro who worked in the turpentine woods found the fawn starving and brought it to my Colonel. The Negro said that the old gentleman nearly cried when he saw the poor little creature; and he fed it himself with a bottle, covered it from the dew at night, and so saved its life. It finally grew into a three-prong buck that ate all the geraniums and kept the lawn shaggy; but my Colonel never regretted playing the Samaritan.

Touching matters of a religious nature, he is not self-conscious. He is reverent. He has nothing in common with those who say in their hearts that there is no God; for he has passed through many waters, and has found Him in their depths. He always says his prayers, though on cold nights he is apt to cut them short. His favorite prayer is that of the Publican, and he often repeats it with comforting contrition.

With very little persuasion he will tell you about the War—and, of course, there is but one war to him. Though he bears two wounds, he is free from any taint of bitterness of self-pity. To the brave men on both sides, he will say, lifting his glass for a toast, to the brave men who fought and the braver women who waited. And to him Gettysburg will always be the greatest disaster in history.

But best of all you will love my Colonel because of his genuine heart. He will meet you in a dugout cypress canoe, ten miles from the plantation; and at midnight in a pouring rain will take you off the stranded tug-boat. Before long he will tell you of the time when, running his Kentucky mare at full speed, he killed the two giant bucks as they jumped the road. It is his way of crowning you with his love and confidence.

His eyes will fill when he tells you good-bye. But as he stands waving to you from the desolate ricefield banks, you will catch the gleam of his eyes and the light of his smile. And you will remember him as a rare and true type of the Southern gentleman.

From Old Plantation Days (1921).

I Leave Home

After my boyhood years crowded with adventure and happiness, I began to have—sensing that the end of my old life was near—a feeling of adoration for Hampton House. Every time I came in the gate, my heart beat faster to see, across the wide pasture lands, happy in the light of morning or of noonday or of the setting sun, or gleaming in the orchid-glow of moon and stars, the white pillars, the glimmering windows, the great chimneys spouting smoke. The old home began to seem like a human heart—generous, understanding, unchanged by the years, wistful and thoughtful. I began to feel that it is a terrible thing to love a place—if one must leave it. Nor did the weeping beauty of Hampton’s woodland setting make the thought of parting any easier.

I was to leave my family circle to go away to school, then to

Reviews for Hunting & Home in the Southern Heartland

[4bonasa · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Delightful stories of life in South Carolina coastal region after Reconstruction to WWII. Also, worthwhile as a window into the south during the notorious era of Jim Crow racism. The stories are fun in their own right with the racism of the soft variety where the negro always gets the better of the white protagonist and/or is the hero. The author is not inherently racist but is as much of a victim as are his black compatriots, both trapped in the time and place of their birth.