This portrait along with the question of the subject’s identity was posted on our Facebook page to provide an entertaining and informative way of featuring iconic figures in American foxhunting.
Paula Nelson was first with the correct answer, and if she will contact us with her address she will receive a gift from Foxhunting Life. David Amos provided the right answer just two minutes later. Also Lauren Giannini and Jesse Welsh got it right—all four within the space of an hour.
Mrs. John (Nancy Penn Smith) Hannum was Master and huntsman of Mr. Stewart’s Cheshire Foxhounds in Unionville, Pennsylvania from 1945 to 2003—fifty-eight seasons! She began by whipping-in to her stepfather, Plunkett Stewart, eventually took over the horn, and when she could no longer hunt on horseback she hunted manically behind the wheel of her battered Jeep. She was one of the few remaining Master/huntsmen in North America to field a pack of traditionally-bred English foxhounds (as opposed to the modern English foxhound).
Mrs. Hannum has been described as opinionated and stubborn—traits no doubt passed down by her grandfather Edward Henry Harriman, the nineteenth century Wall Street railroad baron who founded the Orange County Hunt. As Nancy Mohr points out in her excellent book The Lady Blows a Horn (Horse Country Press, 1997), Mrs. Hannum was “literally swaddled in the authority of belief. And like her famous grandfather, she had a real talent for believing. Matthew Josephson, author of The Robber Barons, wrote of Edward Henry Harriman that when he got into a war, ‘he fought fully imbued with the notion that destiny was on his side.’”
How else, without such conviction, could Mrs. Hannum have accomplished what she did in the preservation of her hunting country? From an airplane at night Nancy Hannum-land “looks like a vast power failure” according to one writer—an oasis between the cities of Philadelphia and Wilmington.
She learned an ethic of conservation from her stepfather and went on to develop astounding strategies of her own. When in the mid-1940s Lammont duPont decided to put his 5,200-acre farm in the middle of the hunting country on the market, Mrs. Hannum devised the solution for keeping the land intact. Seated at dinner next to Bob Kleberg at his King Ranch in Texas, she glowingly described a fertile farm upon which Kleberg could fatten his cattle for the eastern markets. It was no easy task to convince this astute businessman of the merits of her notion, but she did. How she did it is another story. Read Nancy Mohr’s book!
She applied old-world notions of autocracy to new landowners in Unionville. She told them what type of fencing to erect (post-and-rail) and told them exactly how far off the road the fencing needed to be so that horses jumping it would have safe takeoffs and landings. She asked one newly arrived couple to site their planned house differently so as not to interfere with the way the foxes run. She instilled a culture of conservation into her hunt members, pressuring them to buy up properties on the market, as she did, and place them into conservation easement before reselling. She swapped parcels with developers and stalled other planned development projects with bureaucratic delays until the developers gave up the fight. Her name shouldn’t be Nancy, said one new owner, it should be Elizabeth the First!
Nancy Hannum lived a life of privilege but lived it bravely, absorbed the many falls both physical and otherwise as the price to be paid for living life as she would have it, and never swerved from the path she knew to be her truth.
Posted December 23, 2011
Four generations of Hannums with Nancy in the forground: (l-r) son Jock, Jock’s granddaughter Chloe, and Chloe’s parents, Emily and Jeb Hannum (Jock’s son) on the occasion of a meet at Brooklawn, October 18, 2008. / Lauren Giannini photo