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 HistoryAll research into the history of the Chesapeake Bay Retriever always seem to lead back to the Carroll's Island Gunning Club.In the heart of what was once the best duck shooting on the Chesapeake, located where the Gunpowder River meets the Bay, a duck hunting club was originally started on Carroll's Island as early as 1830. The original Club, sold in 1856 to a group from New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, then became the Carroll's Island Gunning Club. The Carroll's Island Gunning Club and their kennels seems to be a pivotal point between the disseminated branches of the still-forming Chesapeake Bay Dogs, Brown Winchester and the Red Chester Ducking Dog strains of the breed and the modern Chesapeake Bay Retriever. Although the first dog show entries of Chesapeake Bay Dogs in Baltimore in 1877, and the resulting first standardisation of the breed may have aimed breeders in the same direction in their breeding goals, the Carroll's Island Club and neighboring gun clubs up and down the Atlantic coast put those resolutions into practice. Across the Gunpowder neck, on a point of land northeast of Carroll's Island along the Bush River, William B. Hurst along with Harry S. Hurst and George Franke purchased 261 acres to form a gunning club in 1887. The farm was the site of some of the greatest waterfowling on the eastern seaboard. The rig of live decoy ducks kept on the Hurst farm numbered 600. The Hurst's dogs were one of the earliest recordered strains of Chesapeakes and were know as Lego's Point strain of Chesapeake Bay Dogs |
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