As we were heading east away from Memphis and Graceland, I was looking through my map books, both of which have some attractions or museums or heritage sights printed on them, and I came across an item I had made a note to go see if the driving route allowed. With a slight adjustment going east a bit further than we planned before heading north we headed for Grand Junction, Tennessee.

Grand Junction is home to the National Bird Dog Museum and Field Trial Hall of Fame, which is 30,000 sq. ft. of photos, paintings (gorgeous paintings of dogs and trainers), cabinets bursting with all sizes of silver cups and trophies, record books, sporting guns, and other information about the sport. It was an awesome place! I was more excited by the vastness of it and the meticulous displays and the wonderful artwork than I was walking through Graceland!

The long pathway you can see on the very left side of the photo is a memorial walk with the graves of many Field Trial Champions along each side.

There are five of these large framed lists of every winner of the National Championship going back to 1896 and up to 2022.

The place was huge! There were separate rooms for: the Field Trial Hall of Fame, Retriever Field Trial Hall of Fame, English Springer Spaniel Hall of Fame, and a Sporting Dog Wing.

The woman that was there caring for the place used to have six staff working with herbut since COVID hit she can get no one to work with helping her keep the silver polished, the floors vacuumed and things dusted. She has tried to find helpers with no success. She is on her own and run ragged. There is no entry fee to tour the building, just a donation box. I am sure the annual fees for the 1000s of members pay for the building’s needs and her wages. But the woman seriously needs some help.

Barbara Bush’s “Millie”

Count Noble. 1879-1891. A gift from the Museum of Natural History in Pittsbugh, PA

There were so many gorgeous paintings of dogs!

Since we don’t know anything about famous sporting dogs or field trials we just wandered through most of the rooms and looked at things we passed by. We did not spend a lot of time reading about individuals that had been inducted into the Hall of Fame or about the Championship dogs. It still took us over an hour to do that. Amazing place.

We were only an hour away from Memphis and it was after 2:30 so we hit the road and did a bunch of driving; only stopping to find one geocache. Our hotel for the night was booked at Union City, which is right on the Tennessee/Kentucky border; just over 2 hours north of Memphis if you took the Interstate. We wander back roads, or at least quiet divided highways as much as possible.

About 20 miles south of Union City is a town called Rutherford, that has Davy Crockett’s ‘Cabin’. It was about 4:30 when we took the turn-off and I expected it to be closed, which it was, but we were able to take a few photos of the outside.

We drove into Union City about 5:30 and found our hotel and dinner. You can now see why the day was split into two parts! It was a full fun day with tons and tons of photos to go through.