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A Slice Of Outdoor Life
Written By: Stuart Ferguson | Issue: November 2024
Maxcy Gregg’s journals recount vivid outdoor adventures that can only be described as “extreme.”
Saturday, November 4, 1843: “…set off in the [small sailboat] Nimrod for Charleston…arrived between 1 and 2 o’clock, soon after the commencement of flood tide….saw one bald eagle on a distant tree and another flying. …I shot at a pretty large bird flying past, which Mayrant pronounced a Sheldrake, adding that it was a kind of duck. We also saw on the way, several porpoises, sharks, cranes, and gulls.”
Maxcy Gregg’s Sporting Journals, 1842-1858 (edited by Suzanne Parfitt Johnson; Green Altar Books, 2019) gives a slice of outdoor life in Low Country and Midlands South Carolina and the mountains of North Carolina. Gregg (1815-1862) was a lawyer in Columbia whose favorite way of escaping the “drudgery” of court was to head out shooting birds and four-footed game. Some of the hunting was for the pot, but much of it was for his natural-history hobby, as he avidly studied the corpses. He also had a homemade astronomical observatory on the roof of his family house.
In a foreword to this fine book, noted Southern literature scholar James Everett Kibler, Jr., quotes historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who deemed Gregg, “Culturally one of the best-furnished men of the Confederacy” and knowledgeable in philosophy, botany, and ornithology. A major general, Gregg was mortally wounded at the Battle of Fredericksburg.
But it’s Gregg’s two-week trip to the mountains of north Transylvania County in July and August 1843 that will interest Laurel readers the most.
He engaged William Burgess, recommended to him as “a great hunter & teller of hunting stories.” The party of four was based at a camp in the Balsam Mountains, about 10 miles north of the Burgess homestead, itself remote and high above Brevard.They went in search of bears and deer but only managed to bag “mountain boomers” (squirrels), turkeys, and pheasants—and it was hard going:
“By the time we got to Looking-glass Creek, what with fatigue, wet, sore feet & hunger, I found myself nearly broken down [amid] sharp showers of rain…even the perspiration caused by the exercise seemed cold.” Once they left the hunting camp and hiked back to Bridge’s rustic-but-solid home, however, Gregg wrote: “Copious draughts of his peach-& apple-brandy, with honey—dry clothes, & and a warm bath for my feet, restored me to comfortable sensations.”
by Stuart Ferguson,
local historian, armchair traveler, and irrepressible raconteur. He reviews books for The Highland Hiker, which maintains an extensive collection of local literature.
