A naturalist’s paradise

We’re the only boat on the water this Thursday afternoon at Grassy Lake. It’s a naturalist’s dream, as if someone took a piece of the Florida Everglades and moved it to Arkansas.

Alligators, egrets, pelicans, herons, eagles— this place has them all. And ducks.

When the subject is duck hunting, Arkansans tend to think of the eastern half of the state. But some of the most historic duck hunting clubs in the South are in an area of southwest Arkansas near where the Little River empties into the Red River.

A waterfowl-rich region of 18,000 acres has long been controlled by private hunting clubs with names such as Hempstead County Hunting Club (commonly known as Grassy Lake), Yellow Creek, Po-Boy and Cypress Bayou. I’m in the boat with Texarkana attorney Lance Lee, president of Hempstead County Hunting Club, founded in 1896.

I grew up in southwest Arkansas, I’m a duck hunter, and I’ve heard of Grassy Lake all my life. Yet it’s my first time to be on the lake. I’m here thanks to an invitation from Lee and Johnny Wilson of nearby Nashville, who has been hunting Grassy Lake the longest of any current member. There are 50 shares of stock in the club, now owned by 26 members.

Much like Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, they call the houses that surround the main attraction “the cabins.” At Augusta, the main attraction is a golf course; here it’s a swamp. As is the case in Georgia, the cabins at Grassy Lake are mostly palatial second homes. Several members are from the Dallas area. A beautiful clubhouse was constructed seven years ago on the shore of the lake.

They don’t allow afternoon duck hunting at Grassy Lake, but Lee wants to show me the property now since it will be dark when we depart on our Friday morning hunt.

“Unlike a lot of hunting clubs, this one is family-oriented,” Lee says. “My wife loves it up here. We have fish fries, luncheons, all kinds of events. After duck season, people come back to go frog grabbing. The one thing we don’t do is hunt the alligators. They’re kind of sacred.”

In 1950, Dwight Moore of the University of Arkansas wrote a paper on Grassy Lake titled “A Biologist’s Paradise.” Moore noted that the lake is almost three miles long and more than a mile wide in places with an average of depth of only three to four feet. He said one cypress tree measured 24 feet in circumference, with many trees at least 110 feet tall.

“The lake and adjoining land are owned by Hempstead County Hunting Club, with members chiefly in Hope, Texarkana and Nashville,” Moore wrote in 1950. “There’s a limited membership, and these well-advised men strive to maintain the lake in as natural condition as possible. On this account, the wealth of plant and animal life is little disturbed and thus renders it a veritable biologist’s paradise. Access to the lake is strictly on a basis of special permission from the club.

“The name Grassy Lake has evidently been applied because of numerous stands of Southern wild rice. This coarse grass grows to a height of 10 to 14 feet in large and small patches throughout the lake. It is in many of these dense growths that the alligators dwell. They may be observed by cautious approach, but too often the alligators’ ears are more sensitive than the observer’s eyes, and they slip away, leaving only the traces of their presence in the mud and vegetation.”

Moore described club members’ cottages, boathouses, the huge oak trees around the cottages and the types of ferns found few other places in Arkansas.

“From the boat landing, marked lanes extend toward various parts of the lake,” he wrote. “The more shallow parts of the lake are dominated by buttonbush, which in places forms dense thickets, even in water several feet deep. On this account, boat lanes must be marked to ensure the safe return of those who go out to fish or hunt. … Toward the west side of the lake, there is considerable open water where cypress trees and buttonbush occur only in scattered bunches. But even here the water is only waist deep.”

The lake covers about 3,500 acres. The club owns hundreds of additional acres of bottomland hardwoods surrounding Grassy Lake. Several hundred acres north of the lake recently were purchased so fields can be flooded and used as rest areas for ducks. An expensive project to add a pumping station and change the channel of Little Yellow Creek was funded by club members to ensure water levels remain steady in Grassy Lake.

Hempstead County Hunting Club also purchased the 1,800-acre Lost Lake Club to provide additional hunting opportunities. There are two oxbow lakes on the property. Fishing along with deer, turkey and squirrel hunting are other favored pursuits of club members.

The Grassy Lake clubhouse is filled with framed photos and other items that outline the club’s history. A logbook from the 1910-11 hunting season contains a handwritten description of when the first automobile came to Grassy Lake. It took the occupants almost two hours to make it from Hope. There’s also a framed copy of club rules from 1949.

Since Grassy Lake is famous for alligators, there’s a stuffed alligator at the entrance to the clubhouse and a carved wooden alligator over the fireplace.

There are photos of the Black men who once worked here as guides. They lived at nearby McNab, Fulton or Saratoga and would arrive in the middle of the night to prepare for that day’s hunt. Wilson, who owns the oldest of the cabins on the grounds (built in 1936), can remember those guides from when he would hunt with his father at Grassy Lake decades ago. There are no longer paid guides.

A cherished tradition is the 7 p.m. draw for blinds that takes place each day during duck season. Members sign a book, put a dollar in the pot and then turn the handle on an 80-year-old box that spits out numbered marbles. Those numbers determine the order in which members can select their blinds for the next morning. The member with the lowest number gets the money in the pot.

The blinds have names such as Creosote, Float Road, Creek, Willow, Cocktail, Old Club House and Grasshopper. Wilson says the tradition has changed little through the years. His great-uncle was a charter member and left that membership to Wilson’s father. On this weeknight during the final full week of duck season, 10 people draw for blinds.

Wilson, Lee and I are in our blind by shortly after 6:30 a.m. the next morning following a 12-minute boat ride in the dark. After a successful hunt, we stop by what’s known as “the table.” It’s a floating kitchen in the lake that includes a large picnic table. Wilson prepares eggs, bacon, ham and biscuits for breakfast.

On a four-wheeler ride around the lake, Lee and I make it to the banks of Yellow Creek. We can see the cabins at Yellow Creek Club, which was formed in 1946 and owns about 2,200 acres of hardwood forest. The adjoining club has about 25 duck blinds (a few of which have kitchens) and 20 deer stands.

In 2017, the upscale Southern lifestyle magazine Garden & Gun featured a story in which writer Bill Heavey accompanied well-known sportsmen Randy Wilbourn of Little Rock and Emon Mahony of El Dorado bream fishing on Yellow Creek, which becomes Beard’s Lake near Millwood Lake. The Wilbourn and Mahony families have held what they call the Brim Rodeo each spring for decades.

“Some of the clubs here date from the 1890s and are among the oldest in the state,” Heavey wrote. “The bottoms are like Eden but with bigger mosquitoes—18,000 acres of waterways, swamps and bottomlands. They’re home to the largest population of alligators in the state, venomous snakes (rattlers, cottonmouths, copperheads and coral snakes), birds like the tricolored heron, the white ibis and the wood stork, and virgin stands of 350-year-old bald cypress.”

I take it all in over two days. And I let Lee and Wilson know that I would love to come back this spring or summer to see the alligators.