A rolling gravel drive nearly a mile long leads to a stately plantation house. Wooden rocking chairs line the front porch, Spanish moss drapes grand oak trees and horses freely roam, grazing rye grass.

This is the Oakland Club, a destination to experience the tradition of southern bobwhite quail hunting.

Chartered in 1905, the Oakland Club encompasses 11,000 acres in Berkeley County, South Carolina, and contains an impressive array of diverse ecosystems including pine savannas and flatwoods, bottomland hardwood forests and floodplains along the Santee River, cypress-tupelo swamp forests, pond cypress wetlands, and open water ponds.

There is a sharp focus on the history of the land and fostering an ambiance that reflects traditional bobwhite quail hunts. Roger Revenelle knows this tradition well; for him, it’s a way of life.

Four generations of Revenelle’s family have ties to the Oakland Club. His great-grandfather and grandfather farmed its lands; his father, a carpenter, helped construct buildings at the Oakland Club; and for the past 51 years, Revenelle has guided quail hunts on the property.

For Revenelle, the Oakland Club is important for his livelihood, but he also has a personal connection that comes from spending every day learning the intimate details of the land. He has a true passion for hunting and trail riding. After a long day of guiding hunts, boarding horses, and preparing birds, most people would likely just want to go home and relax in front of the TV. Not Revenelle. At 74, he often finishes a work day by going out to his favorite places on the property to hunt squirrel, raccoon or deer.

But his favorite quarry is quail. Traditional quail hunting, on horseback with a pack of well-trained bird dogs, is something into which Revenelle was born. He understands its appeal. The prevalence of modern technology and conveniences, combined with encroachment from industrial and residential development, mean there are few places offering the opportunity to relive the experiences and stories told by your grandfather. The Oakland Club offers that, and more.

Ryan Bowles, the Oakland Club Manager, can tell you. “We use every 21st century tool we have to go back to the 20th century, to get it back to what it was in the heyday, back to the 1900’s look and feel when quail was the king,” Bowles says.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo destroyed 87 percent of the standing longleaf pine at the Oakland Club. What was left standing after the disaster was not sufficient to sustain quail. Instead, fast-growing trees like sweetgum and red maple started taking over the grasslands and pine savannas, eliminating nesting and foraging areas for quail.

The Oakland Club responded before the unwanted trees took over completely. Club employees have worked diligently to restore the pine savannas that support bobwhite quail.

Using prescribed fire management, Bowles and his crew have worked to keep undesirable tree species at bay while also promoting the growth of longleaf pines. The Oakland Club’s dedication to restoration helps sustain fire-dependent species like longleaf pine, wiregrass, pitcher plants, and sundews. It also promotes ecologically rich habitats that could support red cockaded woodpeckers, which historically occupied nearby pine stands.

Bowles teamed up with the Service’s Coastal Program and Lord Berkeley Land Trust to establish a conservation easement on the entire 11,000 acres of the Oakland Club. Conservation easements protect land for future generations and allow owners to retain many private-property rights. The habitats, biodiversity, and hunting traditions at Oakland Club will be protected in perpetuity.

Raleigh West, Executive Director of Lord Berkeley Land Trust, emphasizes the impact of establishing the conservation easement on this historic land, ‘“By saving one place,” he says, “you save a region.”

The easement protects a central portion of the Santee River and in so, supports all the farms, hunting traditions, and timber operations that surround it.

This sentiment is echoed by Jason Ayers, the Service’s Coastal Program Coordinator for South Carolina. Ayers explains how protecting the Oakland Club land fits into a broader picture across the landscape by filling in a corridor of protected properties along the Santee River. The corridor, he says, is immense, stretching “from the Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge by the [Atlantic] ocean through the Francis Marion National Forest to the Santee National Wildlife Refuge and further inland.”

To help establish the conservation easement, the Coastal Program developed a baseline documentation report which describes all the species and habitat types found on the property. The conservation easement on the Oakland Club, prevents forest fragmentation. That, in turn, protects ecologically rich habitats and rare species such as a newfound population of the federally endangered plant, Canby’s dropwort. The population found at the Oakland Club is now one of five known populations left in South Carolina.

“The Coastal Program has helped protect thousands of acres in South Carolina,” Ayers says. “However, the perpetual protection of Oakland Club is one of the most crucial and significant private land conservation projects in the history of the program.”

In establishing the conservation easement, Bowles is preserving the heritage of the land, but he is also building his own legacy of restoring quail habitat. It could take 100 years to completely restore the Oakland Club longleaf pine savannas. Bowles knows he will never see the full results of his work, but he’s going to continue to improve habitat on this land.

“It’s the way it’s supposed to be,” he says.

Thriving quail, and a beloved hunting legacy.