This gentleman’s portrait along with the question of his identity was posted on our Facebook page to provide an entertaining and informative way of featuring iconic figures in American foxhunting. We had some respectable guesses, but no one came up with the correct answer!
Meet A. Henry Higginson, MFH!
Born of an old Massachusetts family, he was Master of his own pack, the Middlesex Foxhounds, in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Later he was Master of the Cattistock in England. His father Henry Lee Higginson—businessman and music lover—organized and financed the creation of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and built Symphony Hall in that city.
Higginson adored the English foxhound and was that breed’s proponent in the Great English-American Hound Match of 1905. Higginson had challenged Harry Worcester Smith, a proponent of the American foxhound, to a series of meets to prove which hound type was best. He lost, although to be fair, neither pack was clearly superior. So the debate continues!
Higginson was the fourth president of the Masters of Foxhounds Association, serving from 1915 to 1931, a term considerably longer than his three predecessors. He compiled and edited the first four volumes of the English Foxhound Kennel Studbook of America.
He wrote more than fifteen books, among them the popular An Old Sportsman’s Memories (with J. Stanley Reeve), Hunting in the United States and Canada (with Julian Chamberlain), Try Back, The Fox that Walked on Water, The Perfect Follower, As Hounds Ran, and Letters from an Old Sportsman to a Young One.
Descendants of the Higginson family may be found today in the hunting fields of North America, and the famous Farnley ponies come to us from that family line.
Posted November 3, 2011