COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS

The Works of Archibald Rutledge
"Sportsman for All Seasons"

Archibald Rutledge (1883-1973) is remembered as one of America's best-loved outdoor writers. His short stories appeared in Outdoor Life and Field and Stream, plus he wrote more than 50 books including An American Hunter (1937), Old Plantation Days (1907) and Wild Life of the South (1935).

As a young man, he became nationally known for his popular stories on nature, field sports, dogs and the Southern ethos. He was honored as the first poet laureate of South Carolina in 1934. His gift lay in his ability to poetically describe his hunting and life experiences growing up on his family's Hampton Plantation and the annual treks back home to South Carolina in the summer and on holidays.

Rutledge's rich prose brings the reader right in to the hunt. In his story, "Quail of the Kalmias," he writes: "When Bell drew her point in the brown stubble, I thought it would be sport to walk right in, compelling myself to take the birds at a quartering shot as they passed me to escape into their mountain haunts. What they did always seemed to me about as adroit a maneuver as this crafty little aristocrat ever executes. They arose in two small groups, one led by the old cock and the other by the old hen. There was a difference in intelligence, though not in the size of the birds. Separated by only a few yards, the two groups came hurtling by on either side of me, in strong, low level flight."

As a boy, he hunted birds and deer on the plantation with his father and brothers. He later went away to school in Charleston and to college, in New York, graduating with honors in 1904 from Union College. He spent his career teaching English at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, where he married and raised three sons. Like his father before him, he took them hunting back home in South Carolina and in the woods of the Appalachian hills.