Dear Friends of Hollywood Farms,
When my sisters and I decided to take Hollywood Farms and offer our resources to the public, we adopted a saying you will find at the bottom of almost every page on our website:
Shaping responsibly our next 100 years.
I’ve been around for 68 of the last 100, and it’s a lot of fun for me to see how God has shaped this land through the work of our great-grandfather, our grandfather, and our father.
Now it is our turn, working to be good stewards of what we’ve been given.
There may be no better example of that than our quail course known as Well Oak.
First, the name.
It comes from Joe Carswell’s well and a nearly 200-year-old hickory tree that somehow survived being cleared three different times when the field was cut and planted.
My son named the tract after the well and the tree, thinking it was an oak.
I have failed as a father in that regard.
In our last newsletter, we shared the history of Bel Aire and what the land looked like nearly 80 years ago, when it was all cropland. Well Oak shares a similar beginning.
In the early 1950s, this field was planted in pine trees through the NRCS program known as the Conservation Reserve Program. The goal was to take marginal cropland out of production and replace it with trees, while providing some income during the growing years.
I remember Joe Carswell’s house. He kept a garden, and there were always wild birds around the edges where the field met the woods.
After Mr. Joe passed away, the house sat empty. The pine trees grew, and in 1974 they were clear cut for pulpwood, leaving behind a field full of stumps.
In 1975, I learned how to run a bulldozer. My job was to dig up those stumps so the land could be converted to seasonal pasture for cattle.
We tore down the old house and filled in the well, though it never quite stayed filled.
Around 1984, a 600-pound calf fell into it, and I had to climb down in there, tie a rope around it, and let a tractor pull both of us back out.
In 1994, we planted longleaf pine.
My father was interested in pine straw production, and the tract produced thousands upon thousands of bales over the years for landscapers, all the way up until 2017.
In 2018, we made the first thinning, and sunlight finally reached the ground again. Grasses began to grow.
We planted partridge peas and native grasses, and the land started to change.
We thinned again in 2022, and today Well Oak has become a beautiful, shaded longleaf pine course with strong grasses and thick blackberry patches that provide excellent cover for birds.
That old hickory tree has become a favorite gathering place for a sundowner after the hunt. Our guests are drawn to it, and we are too.
It is our hope that you’ll find yourself there one evening, watching the sun go down over the fields beneath its branches.
That tree has seen a lot. It could probably tell this story better than I can.
October will be here before long.
Mid-season dates are filling quickly, but there are still some strong opportunities in the early and late parts of the season.
If you’ve been thinking about coming, now is a good time to reach out.
Warmly,
Chuck Duggan & The Hollywood Farms Team
