By the time Taylor’s father purchased the land, though, “There was no infrastructure to speak of,” he says. “A couple of silos and a dog kennel. So he just took it from there.”
The property abuts 7 1/2 miles of the Flint River. In addition to four large ponds that the Hanes family had built, Taylor says his father dug six, bringing the total to 10. The ponds are stocked with fish; the third generation of Taylor children used to catch them with cane poles.
Next, the elder Taylor built miles of roads and pathways, including a road that follows the river. There are vast forest reserves, 986 acres of irrigated cropland, and 280 acres of dry cropland. (Currently, farmers lease the land to grow crops.) Taylor’s father lavished the most time on the 3,487 acres of woodland and bird habitats. “There’s so much fieldwork that has to be done to create a proper habitat for the birds to thrive,” Taylor says.
It paid off. Taylor hired consultants to come to the ranch to do something called a “whistle count,” whereby people “go out in the morning and travel around the farm and listen to the Bobwhite quail as the sun comes up,” he says. “They can give a strong estimate based on that.” The most recent count was from 2,000 to 3,000 birds on the property. Even so, Taylor says, the family limits the annual hunting harvest to fewer than 200 birds.
There was once a cattle operation that Taylor says his father shut down before his death. “Still,” Taylor recalls, “he said I’ll have three farms to sell one day: a row crop farm, a cattle ranch that at one point had 700 head of Angus cows, and then a hunting preserve.”
There’s also a horse barn with a sitting area designed by Taylor’s sister. “When he got the bill for that decorating,” Taylor jokes, “it was my sister’s last project on the land in my father’s lifetime.”
Life On The Ranch
Notwithstanding the extensive work put into the land by Taylor’s father, who lived 20 minutes away in Albany, Ga., he never built a significant home there. Apart from a cottage that the family fixed up, says Taylor, “He always said: ‘One day, the family will sell Chokee, and I don’t want the husband to fall in love with the land, but the prospective buyer’s wife to hate the house I built.’”
“Of course,” Taylor adds, “the buyer could be female.”
After his father died, Taylor and his siblings decided to build a 2,700-square-foot lodge, completed in 2014.
“My sister designed and built it,” Taylor says. “The lodge is unique. You don’t enter and find anything dead on the walls, or a big leather recliner. It’s all elegantly designed in a French country motif.” Sometimes, Taylor says, “we get more compliments on our lodge than our bird hunting.” The lodge has three beds and four baths, with a wraparound porch and a fire pit that overlooks a pond.