Henry Goodwin Vaughan, A Founding Father

henry vaughan.furrier — Henry Vaughan riding Norfolk, with the champion Welsh foxhound, Furrier. A gift from Wales, Furrier was bought at auction by Masters of other hunts to fund the new Hunt Servants Benefit Foundation (since renamed the Hunt Staff Benefit Foundation). Furrier was presented by the Masters to Henry Vaughan in appreciation of his long service to the hunts of America and as a co-founder and secretary of the MFHA. The painting is in the possession of the MFHA.

The Norfolk Hunt (MA) can boast of well-known men of American history throughout its earliest rosters—Louis Brandeis, Justice of the U.S, Supreme Court and Leverett Saltonstall, a three-term Governor of Massachusetts and three-term U.S. Senator—but none of its members so dominated the reputation and future of the hunt as did Henry G. Vaughan. He appeared as a member’s guest in 1900 and three years later was elected MFH, a position he held to acclaim for the next thirty years. He was a complete New England gentleman and one of the founding fathers of organized mounted foxhunting in America.

His was hardly the case of a man arriving at a backwater village and uplifting the native savages. Vaughan arrived in Boston from a small town in Maine by way of Harvard University into the midst of the Boston Ames, Cabots, Forbes, Peabodys, Perkinses, and Saltonstalls to be not only embraced, but feted, revered, and almost deified.