Corbin Park Hunting Preserve in New Hampshire
Corbin Park Hunting Preserve is around 20,000 acres or so and it cuts across parts of Cornish, Plainfield, Grantham and Newport. The main page for details about the park is here.
Apparently they have bison, elk, deer and boar in the park. Here are some more details about the park from an article listed on the site I linked to above:
Corbin Park, or the Blue Mountain Forest and Game Preserve, [also known as the "Blue Mountain Forest Association" and "Corbin's Park"], is a private, enclosed shooting preserve with a very limited membership.
The 24,000-acre preserve was founded in 1890 by Austin Corbin II, a Newport native who grew to prominence in the late 1800s as a founder of modern American banking.
Corbin used his fortune to buy up as much land as he could in the Croydon-Grantham area to establish a gigantic hunter’s playground, Originally, it was stocked with bison, white-tailed deer, black-tailed deer, mule deer, European red deer, bighorn sheep, moose, antelope, caribou, Himalayan mountain goats, pheasants and wild boar from the German Black Forest.
The bison, deer, elk and boar all flourished, but the pheasants flew over the fences and the rest of the species proved unable to survive. Corbin Park once had the largest bison herd in the country, and supplied bison and deer to refuges, parks and zoos all over the U.S.
It’s amazing that something like this is still around after all this time. I’m glad it is and, boy, what I wouldn’t give for a tour of the place! I wonder if I could pitch an article to some hunting magazine or other then try to get an interview with somebody that works there, along with a tour? Hmmm…probably wouldn’t get me anywhere but it might be worth a try! ;)
I also found an interesting discussion thread at the Hunting Chat forum about wild pigs in New Hampshire and some information about Corbin Park pigs, in particular. Some guys in that forum wanted to find out where to hunt some of the pigs that escaped from Corbin Park.
That thread also had information about membership costs (which I can’t verify so I have no idea if it’s true or not) starting around $235,000 for a share with around $30,000 yearly membership fee. Interesting if true and certainly outside of my price range.
A pic from Brian Meyer's Corbin Park page. Click it to visit his site.
I found another thread at a different forum though that claims it’s more than $1,000,000 to join. Again, I have no idea if any of these price claims is remotely true or not.
There’s another page with information about elk in New Hampshire that came from Corbin Park:
One hundred years ago, one could hear the bugle of a bull elk in Andover, New Hampshire. Sixty-six years ago, two hundred men spread out across Lempster, Washington, Goshen and Unity and took forty-six wild elk in a two-day season. The elk, more accurately called wapiti or Cervus Canadensis has never been a native of New Hampshire, but briefly roamed free in the state during the first half of the 1900s. Newport-born financier Austin Corbin imported elk into the state in the 1890s as he stocked his private game reserve, the Blue Mountain Forest Park (known informally as Corbin’s Park).
Related posts:
- Turkey Hunting Day 3: One Bird and a New Spot
- Coordinated Search Effort for Missing Hunter in Bear Brook State Park Continues
- Turkey Hunting Day 1: The Dumbass Brings the Wrong Gun!
- New Hampshire Hunting Report – May 2, 2007
- Turkey Hunting Day 2: Right Gun, No Birds
Please note that the domain for my web site mentioned here has changed:
http://www.meyette.us/CorbinPark.htm
The link has been changed. Thanks for the heads up!
This place is fantastic. My grandfather managed this land when I was growing up. It’s really something to see when you wake up in the morning and there are wild boar grazing on the front lawn.
My Grandfather,William Freeman Jenney, was a hunting guide and caretaker at Corbins Park from its inception in 1890 into and perhaps through the 1920′s. While bedridden prior to his death in 1943, my Grandfather wrote extensively about his adventures and experiences working in the park, and from these writings, conveyed 6 chapters of his book to my mother, who later in life gave them to me, in the hopes that they could be published someday. Now in retirement, for fun and possible profit, I have sought the consul of a self publishing consultation service to produce a compilation of my Grandfather’s first person accounts of his experiences in the Park, with original pictures of himself and my Mother with wild boar he shot as part of his job when the boar escaped from the park (he shot 19 boar over two winters applying various ingenious hunting techniques depicted in his chapter “Hogs on the Loose”. The book I produce will also include biographical information on my Grandfather and mt Uncle Bill’s detailed account of the successful mink farming business he and my Grandfather engaged in beginning with a female mink my Grandfather trapped in Corbins Park. Upon your review of my intentions to publish the book described I would appreciate your feedback as it relates to the marketabilty of such a venture.
@ DCH:
Please note my Sept. 18th entry to the Corbins Park blog. It seems we have things in common. I welcome your reply.
Craig, that sounds like a wonderful book! I hope you get it published. Please make sure you post a link to the book here when you do. Have you considered publishing it as an ebook through Amazon.com or something like that?
Here are some instructions:
http://www.ehow.com/how_5416301_publish-ebook-amazoncom.html
And here’s a link to Amazon’s site about it:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/104-7227968-9547934?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200038060
I hope I get a chance to read your grandfather’s book. Thanks for posting about it.
Jim, Thanks for your interest, advise, and ready response to my blog. Finances permitting, I am planning to purhase a quite comprehensive publishing package from AuthorHouse later in the fall, or early next year. The package I could afford includes hook-ups with google and Amazon search machines, but in the meantime, the information you provided enables my research before the fact. For your interest, and for others who may peruse our blogs, I have prepared chapter by chapter synapses of the books 6 chapters.
Title: Blue Mountain Bill
Chapter I: ” How It Came To Be”. A historic sketch on the orgins of Corbins Park and the life and death if Austin Corbin II.
Chapter II: : ” Old Goggle Eyes”. A humorous tale of “Uncle Bill” as hunting guide for an elderly gentleman friend of an early Club member out to bag a bull elk, who wore spectacles with glass 1/2″ thick, and carrying a rifle, large hunting knife, and large bag containing food and a bottle of whisky, which he consumed at every juncture. Half blind and drunk when he shot 5 times at a trophy bull elk, the elk finally went down. As he ends the story about the slain elk, Uncle Bill reports, ” Thats ’bout all there is to it fellers, ‘cept the funny part of it was that Old Goggle Eyes, who could’nt see nothin, never knew that I shot my gun. Its better so, ain’t it?”.
Chapter III: ” The Buffalo”. Uncle Bill takes the narrator to feed the Park’s buffaloes. A fascinating account featuring a ” how to do” on crating buffaloes for transport to city zoos, and historic sketches on Ernest Harold Bayne’s semi-successful efforts to training growing calf buffaloes to wear a yoke and pull a wagon, and Mr. Corbin’s totally unsuccessful attempts to breed black domestic cows imported from Scotland with “Ol’ Cleveland” (the bulls in the Park were named after the Presidents).
Chapter IV: “Over the Fence”. Uncle Bill, the private investigator tangling with poachers taking deer and elk out of the Park. Dangerous encounters
, tough poachers from the Meridan side of the fence, and knocked out with a poacher’s gun barrel, Uncle Bill pursues and makes private settlement with a doctor accomplice in “one of them big cities down country”.
Chapter V: ” Wild Hogs on the Loose”. Venison dinner at Uncle Bill’s, with the full story of how he bagged 19 European wild boars who escaped the Park over two winters circa 1915-1916. Day and night stalking excursions, baiting and shooting from his bedroom window with 8 rifles at once, and in dead pursuit out of their den on snowshoes in deep snow, this is the “how to do” on hunting the elusive and rangy European wild boar.
Chapter VI: ” Honey Bee Fever”. A slight departure from the rest. Uncle Bill Barton, jack of all trades in the pre-depression era, and especially thereafter, was also a beekeeper, whose uncanny instinct for the ways of nature enabled to use the flight patterns of wild bees to find bee trees and extract the Queens for his own hives and production of honey (the bee swarms would follow the Queens). This is the A-Z on wild bee interactions and hierarchies.
Craig A Wilson Editor and Publisher. http://WWW.lagnab@verizon.net
@ DCH:
Nieland?
I used to drive by the house as a teenager in the late 50′s, early 60′s. We called it the “psycho house”-great to see pictures of it now. Corbin Park was where Gov. Merrill was told about some escapades relating to Judge John Fairbanks-he denied being told but it did eventually come out in the courts. I was the first known person to complain about the judge. Great website!
I have heard about Corbin Park for many years. Never realized how large it was. Don’t like these places and what they do or what they stand for. Just plain organized slaughter so someone with lots of money can have a head to hang on a wall somewhere. Whatever!