I am excited about starting a new series on LowcountryHunting. I will be routinely posting some great Southern Americana hunting photographs taken by my good friend Dwight Moore.
Dwight was a true outdoorsman as well an avid photographer who captured daily life for 50 years in a small community that revolved (and still does) around hunting. He passed away this past March at the age of 74 and left behind an incredible body of work which he gave to me. I am just ecstatic at the thought of going through all of his old files to find images to share on this blog! I am also very excited about keeping his memory alive as well as showcasing some of the great work he did.
The picture above is Dwight and his 1978 state record deer. That buck, which netted 147 B&C, now hangs in our local diner for all to see along with a small plaque remembering him. We also have a nice exhibit up at our local museum that displays many of his old cameras as well as 50 of his best images representing his 50 years of photography.
Along with Dwight’s big buck picture, I am starting this series off with three that he took in the 60s. One shot shows a young man and his nice velvet buck sitting on a homemade dog box in his dad’s old pickup. The second shows a scene still playing out all over our great country right now - hunters gathered around a truck looking at the BIG buck in it. And the third image is of my Uncle Nick as a boy and his catch.
I would also like to include this short biography that I wrote to go with Dwight’s exhibit so that you would know a little more about him:
Dwight Moore (1932-2007) was born in Sylvania, GA and moved to Garnett, SC in the early 1950s. There he started on his way to photographing Hampton County and its citizens for the next 50 years. In that time, The Shooter as he was known, took almost a million pictures and captured many people and places that are no longer with us. These photos are just a few examples of his life’s work that included many of our local Watermelon Festival over the years.
Dwight was a dedicated sportsman who spent his life hunting and fishing the woods and waters of this county’s outdoor paradise. In addition to being an avid squirrel hunter, Dwight was a veteran deer hunter. He used this experience as a guide for the Jones 601 hunt club in Brighton for many years. And it was there he killed his state record buck in 1978, along with over 300 other deer.
Dwight was a life-long member of St. John’s Methodist Church in Garnett and the photographer for the entire Black Swamp Charge. He would usually attend several services every Sunday, and he never missed a funeral, christening or homecoming. Pictures of all of those, plus many family reunions, weddings, festivals and graduations, are now forever saved due to the “Shooters” determination to capture a slice of small town South Carolina.
Thanks, Shooter!
I also want to point out that Dwight did what many of us try to do these days - introduce young people to the outdoors. And if you ever wonder what type of affect that can have on on someone, all you have to do is read the eulogy my Uncle Nick Hunt gave at his funeral. It is truly worth reading!
There are some people in your lives that you simply cannot imagine “not being there” anymore. Dwight was one of them. He has “been there” since 1959. I was twelve years old (Dwight was 27) when his family, including his devoted sister, Jane, moved to Garnett. Garnett was a fairly lonely place for a young boy until Dwight arrived.
In the late 1950’s and early 1960’s few people lived in Garnett. There was not much for young people to do. That remains true today! Unless you could entertain yourself in the outdoors by hunting, fishing, playing sports, or other games you would be fairly miserable. But I was a lucky young boy to have Dwight come to town. He was a veteran of the great outdoors and loved nearly all sports. He was a near constant companion in all of my early adventures and many ever since.
Dwight took me on one of my earliest fishing trips to the Ramsey Fish Pond in Shirley in 1959. Dwight fished with a grown up spinning reel from the dam in the large pond. I fished with my cane pole alongside him but had no luck. I was overwhelmed by the size of the pond and bored by a lack of bites after an hour or two. I decided to go down the opposite side of the dam to the spill-well outflow from the pond. I fished on its edges by myself. Dwight may have caught a bass or two from the large pond but I caught a dozen of what I thought were the largest bream in the world. Rather than be angry he had been “out-fished†by a child, Dwight was happy for me. He took a picture of me that day as I held up my stringer of fish.
We spent hundreds of hours hunting rabbits on beautiful early mornings, freezing mornings, or late afternoons. Rain or even snow rarely slowed us down. We hunted with our dogs in lots of different places in and around Garnett. We never killed many rabbits, but we had great fun in the woods with our dogs. His dog was “Rover” and mine was “Ace”. Ace is immortalized in a picture Dwight took of the Black Swamp Methodist Church. That picture is on display in St. John’s Methodist Church in Garnett today.
Before moving to Garnett Dwight had lived a couple of years with his family on the Hamilton Ridge property deep in the Savannah River Swamp. As a young boy I was terrified of being lost in the swamp. Over time Dwight taught me by example to appreciate and respect it but not to fear it. Over the past half century Dwight and I spent thousands of hours in the swamp together. Our territory was mostly Belmont Plantation but sometime on Hamilton Ridge, Gravel Hill or other private lands.
We paddled into Flat Lake on the Webb Center many times before dawn in pitch darkness. He always said we needed to catch the fish “while they were sleeping!” We drove the dirt roads around Garnett just for the pleasure of it. We might see alligators, hawks, owls, deer, wild boar, turkey or quail. Sometimes we saw a fox squirrel, a bluebird or nothing but the beautiful woods, swamps, and fields. Sometimes we would search for arrowheads and pottery shards. For years now I have taken dozens of people into the Webb Center. I now give tours of a place Dwight taught me to love. I took Dwight there last summer for old time’s sake.
We did our share of squirrel and dove hunting as well. Dwight, Lee Barfield, Sidney Jones and I spent even more time fishing in tiny little creeks. We often fished on the railroad right of way behind the Black Swamp Church and Cemetery. No body of water, no matter how small was immune to our fishing attempts! Once we came back empty handed, but not for lack of fishing luck. We simply were not able to find the fishing lake in the swamp!
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Dwight’s love of deer hunting. He spent vast amounts of time on deer hunts but that was a sport we never shared. He hunted mostly with Major Jones, later Ms. Chris and/or Marty. Deer hunting and helping manage the deer hunts was one of the true loves of his life. Dwight killed an amazing number of deer in his lifetime. If I could not find Dwight in Garnett, which was unusual, I always knew where he was. He was either on a deer hunt or at Ms. Chris’ store in Brighton. His trophy deer of 142 Crockett points from 1978 (twelve point buck) is on display in the local restaurant in Estill. As sick as he was this last year Dwight hounded Jeff and me until we got this done for him!
In the 1960’s when we weren’t fishing or hunting we spent time in the “big storeâ€, the huge two story store built in 1894 but now long gone. We heard many tall tales and plain lies around the old pot bellied stove on winter days. We spent time with Ms. Lucille Nix, station master, at the old Garnett Depot. Our “field of dreams†was next to my home and across from the big store. It was the site of hundreds of pick up baseball or basketball games in its season. Dwight worked tirelessly to keep our field in good order for the “Garnett Yankeesâ€. He organized, maintained and stored our baseball gloves and bats. He even maintained statistics of our batting averages, number of homeruns, etc.
Dwight gladly helped with whatever chores I had. If I needed help, Dwight was always there. We delivered groceries far out into the countryside from the store in the 1960’s by pickup truck. During the summers of 1964/68 we loaded tons of estate sale furniture into my father’s big International Box Delivery truck. Then we drove for hours in the bumpy, hot, muggy truck at 45 miles per hour up and down US Highway 17 or some other rural roads in Georgia. One week we made five roundtrips between Macon and Garnett, loading and unloading furniture at each end! This was before most of the interstate highways.
One of Dwight’s other “jobs” was to help Ms. Jones’ with the trot lines for shad and catfish she ran in the Savannah River. He often drove the fish to market in Savannah. In his spare time he cut grass for nearly everyone and many churches over the years. Later in his life Dwight devoted much of his leisure time to holding up the front wall of J.C. Housey’s store in downtown Garnett. In fact there is a recent history of Garnett that Dwight posted on the walls inside J.C.’s store from his pictures and clippings from The Guardian and other newspapers.
Dwight had a number of eccentricities. Over the years Dwight had a variety of cats upon which he doted. Nearly all of them were named Susie”, whether female or not! He did his best to never eat anything “green”; not even pistachio ice cream served at a birthday party he attended. When we were painting the bedrooms in our house in Garnett we painted one of the bedrooms pink. Unsolicited, Dwight observed that he would never paint a room pink! At times Dwight would use the front porch of our home in Garnett for a “deer stand”. He kept a red folding chair and a heavy coat in his “standâ€. One weekend morning we were startled awake by the discharge of a 12 gauge shotgun from our front porch! On Sundays Dwight would often attend multiple church services & picnics to make sure he ate well!
Dwight was a man of few words; but his ever willing spirit combined with his love of nature and the outdoors spoke volumes. We rarely had long conversations yet we communicated in our own way. At times we caught a large number of fish. Most often we did not, but we always enjoyed each other’s company. No matter where we went or what we did Dwight had his ever present camera or cameras! Do you folks realize that Dwight took thousands if not over a million pictures during his fifty year career as The Shooter??
Dwight literally took hundreds of pictures of me and many others. Often he didn’t even know the people he photographed. He freely shared the pictures with me and the other subjects of his camera. He was so proud whenever one of his pictures appeared in The Hampton County Guardian! When I graduated from Estill High School in 1965 he gave me a graduation gift. It is a photo album with dozens of pictures of me, my family, friends and our hundreds of adventures together over the first six years we knew each other.
This is no ordinary photo album. I brought this album with me today for those of you who may wish to see it. Dwight purchased this album and had my name inscribed on its cover. He devoted hours into painstakingly arranging and labeling each photograph with names and dates as he secured them into the album. They are assembled in more or less chronological order. These pictures span from when we first met until I was a high school senior. The album includes many long gone adventures, faces and places but Dwight preserved it all for me.
Dwight’s remains will be in Sylvania with his mother and father, but his spirit will always be here. Local sporting events, family reunions, and Watermelon Festival parades will never be the same without Dwight. I would like to close by quoting just a few lines from one of my favorite songs. It is from the 1960’s during my heyday with Dwight. The song is “Puff the Magic Dragon†by Peter, Paul & Mary. Its symbolism has often been debated but I choose to think it was just about a young boy growing up.
“A dragon lives forever, but not so little boys painted wings and giant’s rings make way for other toys. One grey night it happened Jackie Paper came no more and Puff that Mighty Dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.
His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain, Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane. Without his life-long friend, Puff could not be brave so Puff that Mighty Dragon sadly slipped into his cave.â€
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And I just loved the other pictures. The one shot shows some passengers boarding a train right here in Garnett before they moved the depot. There is not much left of our town today, but at one time it was a very busy place with lots of people and goods coming and going by way of the trains. That is the old Garnett depot in the shot next to the passengers, and I think they moved it in the early 70s.
