The old friend is Big Horn Hunting Club. I joined this club in 1982 and it was already a long established club at that time. My understanding of its history was that several Griffin doctors and their friends formed the club to hunt deer back in the 1950s, when they had to go up to the north Georgia mountains.
Over the years the club had gone through many hunting spots but by the time I joined we had about 1100 adjoining acres leased from several timber companies. The land was located just off Highway 18 between Barnesville and Forsyth, a great location for those of us living in Griffin.
Several of the current members grew up in the club, hunting and camping with their fathers from the time they were too small to carry a rifle by themselves. Now many of them have children of their own that come to camp and hunt with them. The tradition of family hunting was a big part of the club.
When I joined the club we had a big wooden framework we set up and covered with canvas tarps for our cooking and eating tent. A few years ago we built a permanent pole barn type shelter for our cookhouse. That gave us a nice roof and dry place to go without hauling everything to the woods every year.
Each year we had camp the first week of November and cooked all our meals there. Members brought tents and campers and we set up around a big fire that was kept burning the whole week. The Friday night of camp was steak night, and we often had 100 visitors eating with us that night. It was a special occasion.
There is something very special about getting away from the hectic pace of modern life and living in the woods for a week. People love nature and the natural world. You can go to any city and see parks and window boxes with plants that bring a little part of the country to the city, but I have never seen little cities set up in country folks yards and there are no window boxes with little sky scrapers in them!
We had some ups and downs over the years when a company we leased from would clear cut part of the land and limit our hunting options. But this past year a big area was clear-cut, making it unsuitable for hunting for a year or two at least, and then we were notified the timber company was increasing our lease price in that land by about 20 percent. There were also rumors that houses would soon be built on the road frontages. We had already lost part of our lease to houses being built on it.
The club tried several options to save our lease. Most members were not willing to pay a much higher amount for sorry hunting land, so we tried to get enough new members to cover the cost. That did not work, either. Why pay to hunt on land that is not going to have a good deep population for several years?
The club is still alive, but it is in critical condition. We are paying a small amount and keeping a small piece of land just to keep the club alive, but there is no place there to have camp. We are hoping to find a new lease and resurrect the club, but those fantastic memories of the place we had for over 30 years are gone.
Some call the development of land and building house after house on it progress. Another name for it is urban sprawl. Open land is filled with houses, pavement replaces plants and people replace the wildlife. Some make a lot of money off this “progress” but it always leads to more demand for services and higher taxes. Traffic increases and often the reasons people wanted to move to the “country” disappear as progress takes hold.
If you have a natural place of your own, enjoy it. If you are in a hunting club, do everything you can to preserve it and enjoy every minute you have there. All too soon it may be gone.
