Armstrong Family Collection on the Deep River Lodge Collection Guide Now Available

This blog post written by Katie Bushman.

The Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce that the collection guide for the newly processed Armstrong Family Collection on the Deep River Lodge is now available online. This remarkable collection documents the activities of a hunting lodge and the family who lived and worked there in North Carolina in the early twentieth century.

Deep River Lodge was a hunting lodge located in Jamestown, North Carolina, near High Point. It was owned by Clarence Hungerford Mackay, a New York businessman and heir to a silver mine fortune, and managed by Edward “Ned” Armstrong, whose family, including his three daughters, lived on the property. 

Edward Armstrong was born in England in 1873 to a family known for the breeding and care of hunting dogs. His father, also named Edward Armstrong, was an English dog breeder, and his brothers, Jack, Robert Kyle, and William, worked at American kennels. Around 1899, Edward Armstrong followed his brothers to America and soon began working for Clarence Hungerford Mackay.

Mackay (1874-1938) was the president of the Mackay Radio and Telegraph Company and chairman of the Postal Telegraph and Cable Corporation. His father, John William Mackay, had made a fortune on the silver and gold mines of Virginia City, Nevada. Clarence Mackay worked and lived in New York, but in 1904, he bought a tract of land near High Point for the construction of Deep River Lodge. The good hunting found in North Carolina’s Piedmont made it a popular area for wealthy industrialists to build luxury hunting lodges.

The lodge often hosted wealthy hunters from New York and beyond, including English lords, U.S. senators, and members of prominent families such as J.P. Morgan, William Kissam Vanderbilt, and Kermit Roosevelt, son of Teddy Roosevelt. 

Owing to their wealth, the Mackay family was frequently in the press, and a number of newspaper clippings are included in the collection. The most dramatic of these press spotlights involved Mackay’s daughter Ellin, who was briefly disinherited by her Catholic father for marrying Jewish songwriter Irving Berlin, although the family later reconciled.

As the superintendent of Deep River Lodge, Edward Armstrong managed the kennels and saw to the management of the lodge. His family, which included his wife, Florence “Lollie” Amy Whittington Armstrong (1877-1966), and his young daughters Jean Armstrong (1903-1993), Georgie Armstrong (1905-1973), and Thora Armstrong Johnson (1907-1987), lived on the estate. The family materials shed light on the lives of young girls growing up in the early twentieth century. These photographs, letters, diaries, and scrapbooks follow the girls’ lives from their early childhood on the Deep River Lodge property through their education at various schools and colleges.

These materials include letters written during the 1918 influenza pandemic from the girls to their father, who was away on Long Island, where Mackay’s primary estate was located. The letters, written while schools were closed due to the pandemic, detail the girls’ hobbies of tending to the chickens and cats.

The collection also includes memorabilia from the family’s numerous ocean liner voyages between America and Great Britain. Passenger lists, menus, entertainment programs, and postcards offer a glimpse into the experience of passengers aboard a White Star or Cunard ship.

Much of the collection deals with Armstrong’s work in breeding, raising, and showing hunting dogs. These include pedigree records, field trial booklets, instructions for washing dogs (titled “Dip for Dogs”), auction catalogs, news clippings, and a large number of photographs. There is also a large quantity of correspondence from Armstrong’s father, also named Edward Armstrong, who was a dog breeder in England in the late nineteenth century.

The collection also includes a number of artifacts from the hunting lodge. These include a set of enamel toy hunting figures, leather dog collars, a quail snare, and items from a wicker picnic set similar to the one pictured in the photograph below.

After Clarence Mackay’s death in 1938, Edward Armstrong purchased the land that Deep River Lodge and the Armstrong house were located on. Much of this land remained in the Armstrong-Johnson family until it was sold in 2021.

The collection was the focus of a 2023 exhibit at the High Point Museum titled “Fields and Feathers: Hunting at Deep River Lodge, 1895-1935.” Many artifacts from the Armstrong family and the lodge are currently held by the High Point Museum.

If you have any questions or are interested in viewing Special Collections materials, please contact us at library_specialcollections@ncsu.edu or submit a request online. The Special Collections Research Center is open by appointment only. Appointments are available Monday–Friday, 9am–6pm and Saturday, 1pm–5pm. Requests for a Saturday appointment must be received no later than Tuesday of the same week.