T H E S P O RT I N G L I F E
with his wife and his three small children hiding inside. When the gallant Southern lady refused to cooperate with the Yankee officers and reveal the hiding place of her husband and neighbors, they burned the home, but not before making the lady and her children catch and cook the few remaining chickens on the farm. This story alone endeared me to the Kingfisher Society, as Sherman had ravaged my own family’s home place in South Carolina, also torching it and killing all the livestock. After the war, Morgan’s family persevered, got into the textile business and became very successful. Richmond Hill
Lake again became an important part of the family operation. As in most businesses, there is a time to make it work and a time to bail. Jim Morgan’s family did just that and sold their textile enterprise while it was still riding high and before it all went south, pun intended. They kept the plantation, though, and made several wise real estate investments in and around Charlotte. Jim also decided to make Richmond Hill Lake part of the family conglomerate by rebuilding the lake’s spillway and dam, remodeling the family lodge and, in general, turning the enterprise into a bass fisherman’s heaven. “We wanted to elevate bass fishing to the status of trout and salmon, and I discovered early in this operation that there are a lot of sportsmen who would rather catch fish than just fish; and if they’re catching fish, big fish makes it even better. “So using that hypothesis, we did the research and hired the right people. Our fish biologist told us the chemistry of the 150-acre lake would be hard put to raise keeper bass, so we decided to do the next best thing and that was to stock the lake with bass from two to five pounds and then feed them like royalty. We have forty feeders, solar powered, scheduled to feed at two in the afternoon and again at nine in the evening. Not only are the bass growing like crazy, but the bluegill are
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June 2010
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PineStraw : The Art & Soul of the Sandhills