The sixty-year period following the American Civil War was a time of great wealth accumulation and materialistic excess. It was also a time of widespread poverty and growing economic inequality. America became dominated by men of outsized fortunes, and the country developed an aristocracy of the privileged. In 1873 Mark Twain wrote THE GILDED AGE: A TALE OF TODAY, satirizing post-Civil War greed and political corruption in America. The title soon became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life, and the name was adopted for the nascent era in which Twain's book was published. Some new moguls established opulent hunting lodges in the South and leased tens of thousands of acres for quail hunting in the depressed Southern economy. This book examines the reasons for the new wealth and its unequal distribution, why quail were the preferred quarry of Gilded Age barons, what attracted the hunting moguls to the North Carolina Piedmont, what became of them and their hunting estates, and how technology produced changes that transformed the American landscape, causing the collapse of quail populations once thought limitless. Gilded Age hunting lodges are explored, specifically the lodges in and near Guilford County, North Carolina, the locus of Piedmont lodges; their founding, demise, and present status; and how the once rural areas with abundant quail have transformed into urban and suburban expanses without quail. The Pine Needles lodge, established in 1912, is examined in detail with novel stories based on records, memorabilia, and recollections of descendants of those involved in the establishment and management of the lodge.