Author. Ward Allen is the eccentric character in John Eugene "Jack" Cay's 1958 book, "Ward Allen, Savannah River Market Hunter," which was based on a true story. Allen was the author of newspaper articles that have become invaluable to the history of Georgia's beautiful low-country. Born Robert Ward Allen, he was the oldest child of Robert Allen and his wife, Georgia Ward. Besides owning Allen's Station, a plantation with slaves near Savannah, his father was a lawyer. As a boy, his father had him study law in his office. As a young man, he had a physical altercation with a carpetbagger in Augusta. Sent to Europe, he was educated in England at Oxford University and throughout his life, often quoted Shakespeare's plays word for word. He also learned to speak Latin and Greek while in school in Scotland. On a trip to Russia, as the story was told years later, half of his prized handle-bar moustache was shaved by a Moscow barber. This act enraged him enough to attempt to kill the barber, but this was prevented by three Russians physically holding him. Upon returning to Georgia, he decided that becoming either a lawyer or gentleman-farmer did not suit him, rejecting his plantation heritage. Even though he disappointed his father, he wanted to be free in nature, thus devoted his life to waterfowl hunting as a career. Allen's unlikely hunting colleague was Christmas Moultrie, a former slave born on Christmas Day of 1863 on nearby Mulberry Grove Plantation. Regularly at dawn, these two men, along with handmade duck decoys and a hound dog to retrieve, would take a row boat into the low-country marshes in the rivers near Savannah to hunt ducks. The ducks would be sold to local restaurant owners or to private families for their evening meal. On October 23, 1895 at St. John's Episcopal Church, he married Lucy Stubbs, who was over twenty years his junior and the daughter of a high-society Savannah family. The couple rented a large house on Oglethorpe Street in downtown Savannah. Their marriage was tested by him frequently behaving poorly in public after drinking alcohol and being arrested. At one point, his wife had to sale his guns to pay for his bail. Being an excellent marksman, he shot holes, while intoxicated, in the eyes of a large portrait of his wife hanging in their foyer. After the still birth of a son, his wife had a deep long-lasting postpartum depression and was eventually admitted by 1920 to the Georgia State Sanitarium at Baldwin, which was a state mental hospital. Breaking his heart, his beloved wife remained a patient in the mental hospital the rest of her life. As the years passed, the State of Georgia passed laws on conservation of wildlife, which included laws limiting the number of ducks to be killed on one hunting trip and having only certain months available to hunt. Savannah National Wildlife Refuge, established April 6, 1927, consists of 31,551 acres of freshwater marshes, tidal rivers and creeks, and bottomland hardwoods. Since these laws impacted Ward's livelihood, he was arrested for attempting to hunt around the laws. He authored very eloquently several newspaper articles on the subject during the 1910s through the 1920s. He pointed to the fact that the new factories in Savannah may increase the economy but were going to ruin the marshes. He even took the issue to the Georgia State Legislature, yet without any success. The world that he cherished was disappearing. During the next decade of his life, he moved from downtown Savannah to a shack on the banks of the Savannah River, becoming a recluse. His limited income could not maintain anything else. Only dressed in his pajamas, his drowned body was found in the river after he was missing for several days. The events around his death remain a mystery. Was his death an accident, an act of foul play or suicide? He was buried with his family but his grave is unmarked. In August of 2013, a low-budget film, "Savannah," was released, which was an adaption of the book, "Ward Allen, Savannah River Market Hunter." The movie was filmed in Savannah. Although Ward Allen died at the age of 75, in the film, the actor who played his character looked no older than 50. Only 550 of the original "Ward Allen, Savannah River Market Hunter" were published prior to 1959, but after the film's release, which generated a new interest in the book, the book was republished using photographs of the movie scenes. In 2019 a collection of Allen's duck decoys and shotguns were donated to the Georgia Historical Society.