C. Martin Wood III, MFH / Karen Myers photo“Recently I heard the term July hound,” writes Kelly Bryant. “What is a July hound? Is it a breed or a bloodline? How is July blood used in foxhounds today? What benefits do they bring to the hunt, and how does one recognize a July hound from other hounds?”
Marty Wood, MFH is a member of Foxhunting Life’s Panel of Experts. He is a consummate hound breeder, a student of bloodlines, and breeder of the last two Grand Champion Foxhounds of the Virginia Foxhound Show—2010 and 2011. Your editor has some familiarity with the literature on the July hound, so Wood and Fine collaborated on the answer to Kelly’s question.
The July hound is a type of American foxhound, the foundation sire of which was imported in July of 1858 as a puppy from Maryland to Georgia. The puppy was named July by its new owner, Miles Harris in Georgia. July was descended from the famous imports, Mountain and Muse, which were brought to Maryland from Ireland in 1814. Mountain and Muse provided prepotent bloodlines for nearly every strain of American hound that we hunt today, including Penn-Marydel, Walker, Trigg, and others.
In Georgia, July was crossed with the Birdsong hounds and other well-bred Georgia hounds, producing a strain of American foxhound known as July.
Around 1900, July was described as having short, pointy ears, broad forehead, and snipey nose. He had longish, curly hair with a flag to his stern (brushy tail). This description is characteristic of the pure July hound to this day. It was said that July could outrun any red fox and kill it by himself. This was the chief characteristic of his forebears, Mountain and Muse, and the reason their bloodlines were prized by so many American hound breeders of the time.
Probably the biggest champion of the July hound is Ben Hardaway, MFH of the Midland Fox Hounds in Georgia. As he says in his autobiography, Never Outfoxed, he would still be hunting pure July hounds to this day if it had not been for the arrival of deer into his country. He crossed his beloved Julys with various other bloodlines over a number of years, searching for the best cross that would hunt aggressively like the July, yet be steady on deer.
All the Hardaway Crossbreds hunting today—all across North America and abroad as well—have July bloodlines.
More detail may be found in Alexander Mackay-Smith’s definitive The American Foxhound: 1747–1967, published in 1968 by The American Foxhound Club. The book is long out of print but still highly prized by all serious breeders of American and Crossbred foxhounds.
Posted June 2, 2011
Principal progenitors of the July hound were Mountain and Muse, the Irish foxhounds imported in 1814 to Maryland and sketched by Benjamin Ogle in the nineteenth century. / Courtesy of the Museum of Hounds and Hunting