This week, Anne and I decided to go back to Florence, Alabama — our first stop was the Key Underwood Coon Dog Memorial Cemetery, where Key buried his dog in 1937. Since that time, other hunters wanted to bury their dogs there, and a rule was put in place to limit the place to only true coondogs. From the cemetery site:
“When I buried Troop, I had no intention of establishing a coon dog cemetery,” says Underwood. “I merely wanted to do something special for a special coon dog.”
When columnist Rheta Grimsley Johnson interviewed Underwood in 1985, he told her that a woman from California wrote him wanting to know why he didn’t allow other kinds of dogs to be buried at the coon dog cemetery.
“You must not know much about coon hunters and their dogs, if you think we would contaminate this burial place with poodles and lap dogs,” he responded.
My Flickr set of previous visits here.
I didn’t photograph it this time, but my favorite quote on these is this one, for Track:
“He wasn’t the best, but he was the best I ever had.”