Thomasville Regional Airport

T homasville, Georgia, is Quail Country. It always has been. Back in the late 1800s, the wealthy cotton plantations started setting apart land exclusively for birding – in fact, some of those plantations were nothing more than hunting cabins, although nice ones. The Red Hills region of South Georgia and North Florida is a 436,000-acre, outdoorsman’s paradise studded with pine forests and teeming with wildlife. It also has the largest collection of bobwhite quail in the world. So back at the turn of the century, wealthy Northern business executives began purchasing large tracts of land in the Red Hills region, concentrated primarily between Thomasville and Tallahassee. These former cotton plantations soon became private quail hunting lands, each covering thousands of acres. “We get the majority of our traffic during quail season,” explains Robert Petty, Airport Manager for the Thomasville Regional Airport. “There are about 70 plantations in Thomas County, most of them are privately owned and many of those folks fly in during quail season, November to February, and so that’s when we see AT A GLANCE THOMASVILLE REGIONAL AIRPORT WHAT: A general aviation airport WHERE: Seven miles northeast of Thomasville, a city in Thomas County, Georgia WEBSITE: www.thomasville.org/departments/airport Thomasville Regional Airport A L L G O O D T H I N G S A H E A D