About the Chatham rabbit

By Will Sexton
Posted Monday, March 31, 2008

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Pittsboro, NC - As it happens, I kept a blog about the history of Chatham County last year and called it Chatham Rabbit.

Most of my research comes from close readings of first the Chatham RECORD and then the Siler City GRIT from the period circa 1906 to 1918. While writing the blog, as a nod to its mascot, I compiled mentions from the papers and elsewhere of rabbits, rabbit-hunting and rabbit exports, organized on-line here.

I had to back-burner the blog for a major project at my job, but continue assembling material with an eye toward writing an essay on this very topic. Reading the old newspapers, I learned that the rabbit wasn't just a source of coin for the county, but also of identity. The people who lived here took pride in the place as the finest source of rabbit in the country, an accolade readily recognized in North Carolina and beyond.

For a "flavor" (so to speak) of what the rabbit represented to the county, here's Isaac London, editor of the Siler City GRIT (and son of Chatham RECORD founder Henry A. London), on October 29, 1913: "Even as the ancients regarded the Ides of a month, so the toothsome Chatham Rabbit, had it the power of human understanding, would with fear and trembling regard the first of November. On that day begins the assault on Bre'er Rabbit, and with dog, gun and gum the prized animal is relentlessly pursued. Even as Kentuckyians think corn in the liquid state is nowhere else as mellow, so Chathamites know that nowhere else are rabbits so prolific or as delicious as in her own confines." This passage and others seem to make it clear, with respect to your question about whether they were farmed or hunted, that the rabbits lived in the wild and were hunted.

I had occasion to skim (but not read) Mr. Seales' article in the NC Historical Review the other day and while it looks like an interesting and thoughtful history of Siler City, in his section about the rabbit trade he referred to "Chatham Rabbit" as a "dish." I think one more accurately refers to it as an "ingredient." The RECORD reprinted the following from the Raleigh NEWS & OBSERVER in 1910 (and the N&O seemed to have a certain amount of fun casting Chatham as a quaint and rustic backwater): "Rabbit is the principal diet of Chatham's connoisseurs and epicures. No rabbits are shipped from Pittsboro because the fastidious people of that county seat get their beauty and many other good qualities from a diet of rabbits. The best cooks have ninety-seven different ways of cooking the rabbit, and the animal is so good in each way that when Pittsboro folks go away from home they carry enough rabbits to give them at least one a day while they are gone. They have been known also to carry a broiler and to be found by their hosts broiling a rabbit in their room after they thought everybody else had retired. They do not understand how anybody can prefer canvas-back ducks or Lynnhaven bays to the succulent Chatham rabbit."

The picture of the rabbit from the postcard on the cover of the NC Historical Review is also available here. While cameras can play tricks, that rabbit does seem larger than the wee fluffy bunnies that one sees around the area now. As for what happened to them, I haven't gotten to that part of the story yet. I know what Bynumite John Wesley Snipes said in an oral history interview on this question, and it's one of the blog's epigraphs: "Chatham County has been blessed with rabbits .... But the foxes got so they destroyed them, and we don't have that many rabbits now, very few."