bidden in towns by their husbands and fathers. The same prevailed at spe-
cial events such as fairs, especially when traveling circuses arrived. Both
fairs and circuses provided a mixture of educational and lurid attractions.
Freaks, fraudulent marvels of the animal kingdom, and scantily clothed
women dancing or riding horses either intrigued or put off decent folks. Cir-
cuses’ exhibitions of genuinely exotic animals, usually African and Asian,
were enormously popular with southerners. Since everyone in this cul-
ture was so intimately connected to animals already, children, preachers,
women, and indeed men longed to lay eyes upon elephants, lions, tigers,
rhinoceroses, zebras, and giraffes. But could they avoid the lurid while visit-
ing an educational marvel?
Home and church, as Ownby writes, were literal and figurative redoubts
of decency. The task of evangelicals, simply put, was to extend them to the
woods, to Main Street, and to the fair and the circus. In the instance of hunt-
ing, they had influential allies, of course, in elite sportsmen, who were well
organized by early in the twentieth century, and in the new and growing
corps of professional foresters. Bingeing hunters, after all, careless of ani-
mal welfare, were notoriously careless with fire. A Southern Baptist weekly
paper actually endorsed conservation, which included fire suppression as
well as game protection. By , nearly all North Carolina counties had
restricted hunting. Deer season was restricted to two or three months; sea-
sons for quail, turkey, and other game birds lasted three or four months.
Some counties prohibited the taking of squirrels and opossums. State law
prohibited the killing of nongame birds. (There was an active Audubon So-
ciety, founded in —apparently the South’s first—at the North Carolina
College for Women.) Bag limits were becoming common, too, throughout
the region, and—the dead heart of William Elliott must have quickened
—states or counties came increasingly to require hunters on any private
grounds other than their own to obtain landowners’ written permission.
Old laws prohibiting fire-hunting at night were now enforced. Fishing with
dynamite and market-style nets were outlawed.
In towns, ministers, organized women, some reformist editors, and sup-
porters from business communities succeeded early in segregating rowdy
sin spots and districts—from churches, from near schools, and from the
emporia decent people wished to patronize. Chapters of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union participated in such moral ‘‘zoning’’ codes,
even as they conspired and paraded to ban saloons altogether. At home and
in church, too, women led (or persuaded or bullied) their menfolk to sign
temperance or abstinence pledges. (One of my grandfathers, a South Caro-