You're exactly right. What I was referencing was strictly for eating purposes, but still you're exactly right about the taking of so many deer and the reason for doing so. I don't know if that was why Virginia had a conservation law that far back or not, but possibly so. Virginia was settled much earlier than SC. The English settlers who came to stay didn't arrive in the current Charleston area til 1670. I've read about the "hide trade" in SC during the early 1700s, may have stated as late as the late 1600s, where wagons full of deer hides made their way from the current upstate to Charles Towne to be shipped to England. BTW, I see you're in Heath Springs. Did you graduate from Andrew Jackson? I did in 1976 and my wife in 1980. We're both originally from Kershaw, but she passed away in January 2021 and is buried in Kershaw. I still live in Mt. Pleasant across the river from Charleston, where we moved in 1987 after I resigned from the Army. Most of her remaining family and mine are still in the Camden-Kershaw-Heath Springs and Lancaster area.