re: Deer Hunting 50 years ago (Update in OP)

I'm 53, so I've hunted for a little over 40 years. In the 70s we either still hunted WMAs (West Bay or 3 Rivers), or hunted with dogs in the swamps/marshes near NOLA. I liked rabbit hunting best back then, but deer hunting with dogs with a big group was awesome.

I never hunted a food plot until the 90s. Never used a game camera until the mid 2000s after I bought land. There are way more deer recently than back then (except for on my club this year). Back then 6-10 guys were glad to get one deer in a weekend and happily shared the meat.
Shitty rubber boots, crappy cotton long John's and Baker climbing stands are things I dont miss. But I miss hunting with a pack of hounds.

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The Prentiss?

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Could have been. I remember seeing it when we drove from Vidalia to my granfather's place on Brushy Bayou. Just as we got into Ferriday, we turned left to go towards Frogmore. It was on the right as soon as we made that left turn.

People driving from Vidalia out past Frogmore now would turn left before getting to where we did back then. They built a new road that we started using way back in the 60's.

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What I was always told the reason many deer wasn’t around back then in Louisiana was everything was cotton fields. Basically there was no woods whatsoever in much of the state b/c everything was cotton. There were deer of course in the 19th century even though there was a lot of farmland but population much lower so there was still a lot of woods mixed in with cotton fields, but 1920s/30s no so much woods.

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Deer don't have to have agriculture to live in an area.

Kind of a shame what the club has turned into in some ways. People lying about what they see worrying about other people seeing what you got on camera.

But we're still not completely like most of those clubs.

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I'm interested in how deer were hunted in the south 50 years ago.

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50 years ago you didn't see deer in this area unless perhaps you were walking around Chicot State Park and got lucky.

My Dad grew up in the 40s and 50s and told me people would think you were crazy if you said you saw a deer in the woods back then.

I assume they were heavily hunted during the Depression and only came back after scientific management of the population.

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I assume they were heavily hunted during the Depression and only came back after scientific management of the population.

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This is so true. Back in the year 1970's is when deer started having a good come back in my area. By the early 1980's, the herd was getting out of hand. We had WL&F come in. Problem was that we had way to many does and the herd was getting to the breaking point of to many deer for the land. Well, that went on for a good 7-8 years till they said, ok, y'all have to start killing off does. NO shite. At that point, there were few nice bucks. WL&F screwed that up big time. But I have to say, they were still learning on how to manage deer back then.

Growing up I hunted with my Grandad in South Alabama - Baldwin and Monroe Counties. We hunted the farms he grew up on and I doubt he changed much from when he first started deer hunting. This was late 80's - through the 90's.

We would start on either a home made ladder stand, sometime a board nailed between a fork in the tree, or a natural ground blind. The property was mainly pines around cotton fields. We had a few food plots in the field corners. Mostly would hunt looking down bushhogged roads through the pines watching trail crossings or down near the creek. We would sit till about 8 or 8:30. The we would head to the old farm house and wait for all of his cousins and their sons to show up. We didn't have dogs so we would do man drives through any little finger of woods or clear cut 40. on any piece of property they owned or had permission to hunt. Everything that we didn't plan to hunt that evening at least.

If there weren't enough people for a drive, we would go to the small oak flat behind the house and shoot squirrels.

Always had both a rifle and a shotgun for each person in the truck.

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aybe we should just ban the rednecks.

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What about coonasses?

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Not 50 years ago, but I’ve been hunting since the 70’s...no land was posted. I remember driving home with my dad and seeing a deer at night. Next day we would go hunt that area. No box stands, we’d sit in lean to stands and freeze our butts off. Hunting clothes sucked. You’d wear 2 pairs of socks when it was really cold and put on my big brother’s jeans over mine.

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Sounds kinda like my Dad! He worked as a supervisor for the highway dept. in the 1960's based out of Winnfield and would drive a state issued pickup all over CenLa, from the River in the East to the Lake on the West, and pull over every time he spotted game to note it on a map. He'd then go back off work and take his prize winning bird dog Cleo (Cleopatra of Louisiana). Kept the freezer full of meat. I can remember venison and dove and duck on the table...we moved to Florida when I just 3 too (1967)!

He told stories of he and his brothers taking their guns to school with them on the schoolbus so they could hunt on their way home. That was purely a practical thing. He grew up on a cotton farm in a literal dirt floor shack, 1 of 9 kids.

I'm just guessing but i'm sure they'd go in the woods and scout for signs (scrapes, rubs, trails, tracks, ect...) kinda like I do now when hunting public land. Then hunt the areas with most signs or where the rubs and scrapes look like from a big buck until you catch him slipping.