An aerial shot of the main area for The Fleming Preserve’s lodge and other buildings. (Images courtesy The Fleming Preserve)
Three local men are putting their hand to the plow out in Amelia County to transform a longtime farm into an upland hunting event venue.
Clay Scott, Jonathan Bowman and James Moffitt this month opened The Fleming Preserve, which sits on a 2,600-acre property at 8702 Bevils Bridge Road along the Appomattox River.
The newly opened venue offers upland hunting and clay and skeet shooting, as well as lodging, aimed at hosting both smaller groups and corporate events for those in the Richmond area and beyond.
Scott grew up on The Fleming Preserve’s property, which has long been a family farm and still has an active timber operation on a portion of the property. The Fleming side of his family purchased the property in 1924.
The property includes a 3,800-square-foot lodge from the 1960s, which has been recently renovated to house Fleming Preserve guests, and an adjacent farmhouse the group plans to renovate soon for an additional five to six guest rooms.
Scott said his family has been hosting events on the Fleming property for his entire life, adding that there is an existing friends and family hunt club on the property separate from the new business that focuses on deer and turkey hunts, while The Fleming Preserve is geared toward upland hunting, a type of hunting that pursues land-dwelling game birds on dry land like fields.
The Fleming Preserve offers guided and unguided upland hunting as well as other outdoor recreation.
Scott previously spent around seven years working as a project manager for general contractor HITT Contracting in Richmond. He moved back to the Fleming farm in 2020, missing rural life after living in Richmond for some time.
“My whole life, I’ve wanted to do something on the farm, build a business of some sort without overexploiting it,” he said. “This has really been a dream since I was a little boy.”
Wanting to do something with the land, Scott enlisted longtime friend Jonathan Bowman, an account executive at TV station WTVR in Richmond, to help him. They’d previously toyed with other business ideas together, but landed on the concept for Fleming Preserve after a good hunt they went on together elsewhere in the region.
“We just kind of looked at each other one day after a hunt and were like, ‘Man, that was great, but we can do this, and we can do this a lot better,’” Bowman said.
He added that they felt like they could use their combined love of hunting, Scott’s background on the Fleming land, and Bowman’s previous experience writing a column for the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources on cooking with wild game, to create a new venture.
Scott and Bowman obtained a long-term lease from Scott’s family for the entire 2,600-acre property and its buildings to be used for The Fleming Preserve.
Scott and Bowman have been working on The Fleming Preserve idea for almost three years, and more recently enlisted the social media, marketing and creative assistance of Moffitt, the founder and owner of TrailHead Creative, a branding and marketing agency. Bowman knows Moffitt through his work at WTVR.
Moffitt, a former long-time vegetarian turned “adult onset hunter,” said the timber operation on the property has created fresh cutovers that serve as an attractive habitat for quail and other small game birds, something he was passionate about.
“(Scott) and his family have done a really fantastic job building a functional farm and a functional timber operation that also is a really strong habitat for native species around,” Moffitt said. “We want to do this in a way where it’s not just a ‘turn and burn’ hunting preserve.”
Scott is a majority owner in the Fleming Preserve, with Bowman serving as a co-owner and Moffitt as an “operating partner.” Moffitt said that with TrailHead Creative doing brand marketing for the business, he does not hold equity in the business but has a “voting and vested interest” in the business.
Scott said that with much of the land already suitable as hunting ground with the presence of small game, there was some planting done to get the preserve up to snuff, though renovations were mostly concentrated on the lodge, which was previously a 34-bed, open-concept hall that has been turned into four king bedrooms, bathrooms, a game room, a living room and a commercial kitchen, with areas to play poker and pool.
Around $300,000 has been invested in the lodge renovation alone, with other changes including a new roof and refinished floors. The founders are working on renovating the lodge’s basement into a roughly 25-seat area envisioned for corporate guests to gather and host presentations.
The site now also has a covered, five-stand clay shooting area, as well as six hunting areas with different fields, and several longstanding barns now used for storage.
About 800 acres of the land is being used exclusively for The Fleming Preserve, though Scott said the founders plan on doing horse trail riding that would encompass the entire property. The property currently has around 50 miles of existing trails throughout as well as seven ponds, including one nearby to the lodge, for fishing.
Prior to officially opening, The Fleming Preserve ran around 12 hunts ranging from three to 12 people each as a “testing season” last year as a sort of soft opening. It also hosted a few different fishing events, including for a local Boy Scout troop and local members of fly fishing nonprofit The Mayfly Project.
The business is now open for reservations for this coming November through March, after mostly filling up its October bookings in recent weeks.
Bowman said the business offers a variety of both guided hunts as well as unguided hunts for more experienced hunters, adding that most groups will likely be around three to four people. For around $500 per person, guests can come to the property for breakfast, do a safety briefing and warm-up shooting, spend three hours hunting with a guide and then head back to the lodge for appetizers and refreshments, for an experience that runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
All packages include gun rental, though guests are welcome to bring their own shotguns.
Two hunters at The Fleming Preserve.
Higher priced packages include a lunch in the field, in which the game is cooked over a grill, or a plated dinner cooked by a chef in the lodge and lodging either the night before or the night after the hunt. The most expensive option for a group of four including lodging and an all-day hunt with lunch and dinner is $4,000.
Pricing for corporate retreats varies by size and the itinerary.
Unguided upland hunts can go anywhere from $600 for a half-day of hunting for two people up to $1,600 for a full-day of hunting with a field lunch for four people.
Bowman said the guide brings multiple dogs like pointers, who find the birds and point to them in the fields, as well as flushers, who find hidden game and rouse it into flight.
He added that a typical Fleming Preserve hunt includes a “mixed-bag” of quail, pheasant and chukar, with the guide helping participants to know when to take a shot, the dogs retrieving the birds, and the guide carrying the game with them in their bag.
“You do that for a couple of hours. Most of the time you’re going through multiple areas so it gives you some variety, you’re not just in one field the whole time,” Bowman said.
The preserve has a plucker machine that plucks each bird, and customers take any uncooked birds home vacuum-sealed and whole, with the skin still on.
From left: Jonathan Bowman, Clay Scott and James Moffitt.
“That’s huge for us … it definitely reduces waste and is a lot more ethical to the animal,” Moffitt said. “Half the fun of this is being able to take the wild game home and experiment with different recipes.”
Scott noted that reservations are for private groups only; guests do not share the property with other parties while they are there.
The preserve also has membership options that Bowman said are largely targeted at businesses looking to entertain on a long-term basis. Memberships can span anywhere from $15,000 to $45,000, to include five to 10 standard hunts among other options related to private dinners, fishing, skeet shooting and other property amenities.
“We want to really be able to target the corporate people who are trying to entertain clients and do something different. Do something different than golf, do something different than deep sea fishing that’s still exciting … that’s got a lot of adrenaline involved,” Bowman said.
The group outsources hunting guidance to independent contractor hunters, which Bowman said is how hunting preserves typically operate. They tapped some guides who previously worked at Goochland-based Orapax Hunting Preserve, which shut down its bird hunting operations in recent years. The Fleming Preserve currently has around eight to 10 hunting guides on the roster.
They also hope to add a full-time chef potentially sometime next year.
The facility is open year-round, though the typical upland hunting season is limited to roughly September through April, Bowman said.
Scott resides on the Fleming property with his immediate family and his parents, running the preserve full-time, while Moffitt and Bowman are also on-site often while continuing their jobs at TrailHead Creative and WTVR, respectively.
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