Northern Hunting Plantations in the Red Hills Region, 1870-1930

In 1919, Walter C. Teagle had already served two years as president of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. This was also the year that Walter E. Edge, a friend, and then governor of New Jersey, introduced Teagle to the Red Hills Region of southwest Georgia and northern Florida, an area already renowned by wealthy sportsmen for its winter hunting colony. Teagle liked the area shooting enough to purchase land in Leon County, Florida, for a collective hunting preserve that he and eight other hunters named Norias. The group proceeded to buy adjoining lands and eventually increased their holdings to 19,000 acres. Several years into the venture, Teagle bought all interest in the land and turned the hunting club into his private estate. The business ethos that Teagle cultivated as a mover in the oil refining industry permeated his leisure activities; his biographers note that his "drive for efficiency and perfection applied at Norias in the same manner as it did everywhere else." According to the biographers, Teagle's relationship with his estate workers indicated his efficient, yet progressive business sensibilities.