Foundation being laid for Lee Farms

The entrance gate to Lee Farms is quite impressive.

This month’s featured Mississippi hunting camp, Lee Farms, is like many camps — a work in progress.I received a call last fall from my longtime friend Ed Pulliam who began to tell me about a unique camp his brother-in-law Buddy Lee and wife Linda were in the process of creating near Benton. Ed asked if I would agree to come from time to time and take photos memorializing the transition their facility and land were going through as they made major upgrades over the coming years.

Since Ed is an outstanding craftsman and mechanic whom I owed many favors to for keeping my old vehicles on the road for many years, I readily agreed, and we set the date for my first visit.

After hanging up the telephone, I realized that what all goes into creating and maintaining all the physical infrastructure — cabins, roads, stands, plots, etc. — at hunting camps was something I had not given enough accounting of in past stories.

When I drove through the impressive entrance gate and drove beneath massive “LEE” letters to begin winding my way through the wooded rolling hills on a well-maintained scenic road, I immediately surmised that Lee Farms was going to be a special place.

I finally drove out of the woods into a sprawling meadow neatly fenced and bordered by a circular road with horses inside the fence, a lake and cabin at the end of the road, and workers busily erecting a massive two-story facility by which I parked my truck.

Buddy, Ed and co-workers Joseph “June Bug” Anderson, Melvin Woodbury and several other laborers were in the initial stages of this new building, which I learned will eventually house a tack room, horse stalls, deer-cleaning room, game cooler, wash room and so on. I also learned that the large main beams being used to frame the building are old telephone poles that they are cutting into square beams, a fine example of good environmental recycling.

Buddy and Lynda, owners of BenMark Insurance company, acquired the original land several years back, and have gradually purchased other surrounding acreage since that time until they now have about 1,000 acres of contiguous land. They have also erected several nice shooting houses over large food plots and green fields.

A number of quality racks have been harvested already with even bigger racks expected as they allow their deer herd to mature through a selective harvest plan. On my brief visits thus far, I have seen several deer and large flocks of turkey in the fields.

Ed loaned me an ATV so that I could roam the woods roads and get a firsthand look at their grounds. I found an idyllic setting of rolling hills filled with hardwoods and a thick bottom with a fresh creek flowing through it.

Since only the family and a few friends hunt here, the game population is left fairly undisturbed. While there, I sat a couple of their shooting houses, a one-man house in the woods for the morning hunt and then a larger one overlooking a large bottom field late that afternoon.

During the morning hunt, I heard several bucks and does grunting their way up and down the hills, but none entered my small green field. In the afternoon hunt, I had a small doe feed in front of my stand and heard a mature buck grunting in the woods behind me, but was unable to entice him toward me.

Both shooting houses were comfortable and professionally constructed with lift-up windows on all sides controlled by ropes and pulleys enabling the occupant to quietly open or close whichever side’s windows are needed or not needed at the moment. And each shooting house had comfortable seating as well.

The two-story main cabin at Lee Farms is a treat in itself with its multiple bedrooms, main living room with a wide fireplace, screened porch and scenic view of the lake.

Ed has bought about 40 acres across the road from the entrance to Lee Farms, where he plans to eventually build one or more homes for him and his sons to have their own living quarters nearby.

By the time we witness its completion, I believe Lee Farms will rival another formerly featured camp, Double L, owned by the Lloyd family along the Big Black River near Canton. Both are classic examples of what quality game and land management can achieve on relatively small tracts of land. And perhaps more importantly, what quality times such wonderful places can give their families.

Buddy, Lynda and Ed will continue in the months ahead to bring to fruition the place of their dreams.

And, as they do, I plan to be there, camera and note pad in hand.

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