The month of November is full of so many traditions. Between Dia de los Muertos and Thanksgiving festivities, the month is packed with celebrated occasions. Some of the more unique celebrations in Aiken County are the Chitlin Strut Festival in Salley and the Blessing of the Hounds in Aiken.
The Chitlin Strut began in 1966 when the newly elected mayor of Salley, Jack Able, needed to raise funds for new Christmas decorations for the town. Able, along with Salley council members Maxie Adams and P.G. Sharpe, went to visit a radio disk jockey named “Friendly” Ben Dekle in Cayce, South Carolina, to see whether he could suggest a fundraising idea for the town. Dekle had grown up on a farm in Pelham, Georgia, and he declared that he had always favored a Chitlin Strut but had never found anybody with “guts” enough to put one on. Using Dekle’s connections in the country music scene, Able and Dekle created a festival that featured chitlins along with a county music dance contest called strutting. Thus the Chitlin Strut was born on November 26, 1966, and it occurs annually on the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
Since its first year, the festival has grown from 1,500 attendees who consumed 500 pounds of chitlins in 1966 to over 60,000 attendees who ate 20,000 pounds of chitlins during the festival’s peak years. Formerly known as chitterlings, chitlins are made by cleaning, boiling, and then frying pig intestines. New features were added to the Chitlin Strut over the years, including carnival rides, artisan booths, a beauty pageant, a hog calling contest, and food vendors for those attendees who chose not to eat chitlins. Entertainment has expanded beyond the original country music focus to include gospel, pop, and R&B.
While there are a few other festivals across the United States that celebrate the chitlin, the Chitlin Strut is so popular and well attended that the citizens of Salley have proclaimed the town the “Chitlin Capital of the World”. In 2015, the South Carolina legislature honored the 50th anniversary of the Chitlin’ Strut by declaring November 28, 2015 as Chitlin Strut Day across the state of South Carolina. You can enjoy the festivities of the 54th annual Chitlin Strut this month on Saturday, November 30, in downtown Salley.
The Blessing of the Hounds is the opening ceremony for the drag hunt held on Thanksgiving Day in Aiken’s Hitchcock Woods. A drag hunt uses a cloth saturated with an artificial scent that is dragged across the terrain to create a trail for hounds to follow. The searching hounds are followed by mounted riders who race and hurdle jumps along the trail.
According to Harry Worcester Smith’s book Life and Sport in Aiken (1935), the Aiken drag hunts were started in 1916 by Earle W. Hopping. In 1917, Walter W. Phelps took over the organization of the event. After taking a year off in 1918 during World War I, Mrs. Thomas (Louise) Hitchcock became the Master of the Fox Hounds (MFH) in 1919. Louise Hitchcock’s name has long been connected to the drag hunts and other equestrian sports of Aiken. Her event became a Winter Colony tradition and a grand way to begin the season here in Aiken. Per an Augusta Chronicle article published on November 29, 1929, “Five Pullman cars brought a large number of visitors from the North, East and West to Aiken yesterday for the Thanksgiving holidays, which will be featured by the first drag hunt of the season Thanksgiving morning in the Hitchcock Woods.” As a result of her early efforts, the drag hunt has been celebrated for just over 100 years and is popular with both Winter Colonists and locals.
After Louise’s death in a fatal hunting accident, the Hitchcock family established the Hitchcock Foundation in 1939 and donated 1,120 acres of the family’s land to be protected and preserved in perpetuity. Want to be a spectator at the Blessing of the Hounds? After you enjoy Bloody Marys and bagels on the grounds of the Aiken County Historical Museum, provided as a fundraiser for the Aiken Land Conservancy, the public is invited to walk into the Hitchcock Woods at its South Boundary entrance to witness this lovely tradition.
By Lauren Virgo + Leah Walker
