ED MACK FARRIOR: "I WAS RAISED IN IT."

PERHAPS THE BEST authority on Bullock County's place in sporting history is ninety-two-year old Ed Mack Farrior of Union Springs. Though modesty might prevent him from admitting it, Farrior is widely regarded as one of the best field-trial bird dog trainers who ever lived. And like the purebred English pointers and setters he reared, Farrior inherited a love of the chase. "I was raised in it," Farrior says. "My dad was a bird-dog trainer and trained field-trial bird dogs in the early 1900s." Farrior's father, Edward Farrior Sr., was one of the first individuals to be inducted into the newly formed Field Trial Hall of Fame in 1956.

Growing up, the younger Farrior learned where to look for quail and spent long days in the fall and winter pursuing them across the fields of his family and their neighbors. "Back in those days, every farmer always had one or two bird dogs in his yard," he says. "Farming was about the only way to make a living, and everyone had gardens, pea patches, and cornfields. These gardens had good populations of quail on them. In a day of quail hunting in those days, I could usually find and flush twenty to twenty-five coveys of quail, each with ten to fifteen birds in a covey."

Farrior competed in his first field trial in 1919 when he was only seven years old. Ten years later, at the age of seventeen, he earned his first big win. As Albert Hochwalt, a writer for American Field, observed in 1928, "Ed Mack Farrior was so small that when he dismounted from his horse the animal seemed like a mountain standing beside him. And when he wished to mount, his father or one of his uncles had to be near to give him assistance. But he did not require assistance in handling his dog; he understood how to approach, how to flush the birds and how to shoot and keep his dog steady."

To compete in the finals at Sedgefields, Farrior remembers, each dog had forty-five minutes to show its stuff. Judges rated each dog on its ability to locate and point quail, staunchness on point, style, and aggressiveness in finding birds. "Often there'd be as many as eighty or ninety bird dogs competing for the title of National Amateur Free-For-All Champion," Farrior recalls.

At that time, there was not much of a market for bird dogs or field-trialing dogs. Winning a field trial had more to do with the pride and prestige of knowing you had the best bird dog in the county-rather than the amount of money you had won or could potentially make by selling your dog. However, once field trials became widely popular in Bullock County, the dog breeding and training business thrived, and the best breeds could fetch handsome fees for their owners.

"Back then, a good shooting dog might sell for as high as five hundred dollars," Farrior recalls. "I heard of one field-trial dog that supposedly sold for five thousand dollars, which was a huge price to pay for a dog in the 1920s and 1930s."

Asked about the celebrities who once came to the field trials at Sedgefields Plantation and how many he had met, Farrior just laughs. "I never paid any attention to the celebrities or the politicians at the field trials. I was too busy working and training bird dogs to try to earn a living for my family to be concerned with who was in the gallery and what they did for a living." Today, Farrior is something of a local celebrity himself. In 1982, he was inducted into the Field Trial Hall of Fame, becoming a member of the same illustrious company his father had joined almost thirty years earlier.

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