In Unionville, a woman known as famously for her place in fox hunting as her place in land conservation has firmly made a place for herself in the county’s vast sports history.

Nancy Penn Smith Hannum moved to Chester County when she was 9. She lost her father prematurely the year before, but later gained a stepfather, W. Plunket Stewart, who adored her. Along with her mother, an accomplished horsewoman, her parents taught her about the hunting world. She was a formidable competitor in showing and point-to-point races. As a horse trainer, she won the Maryland Hunt Cup twice and the Cheshire Bowl 14 times with seven horses.

In 1948, when her stepfather died, Mrs. Hannum took over the reins as Hunt Master of the Cheshire Foxhounds, stepping into the duties of overlooking stables, horses and hounds for the next 50 years. It was an exhaustive job. Her eldest son, Jock, remembers her 5 a.m. visits to the barns for feeding and mucking, as well as her 12-hour workdays. “Sometimes I would go to her room before she would head out to the barns just to say good morning or have a chat,” Jock said. “If you wanted to catch her, you had to be an early riser.”

She spent just as much time caring for her three children. She never missed their baseball games and even made up her own scorecard while she was there. Her daughter followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a successful rider.

For the Hannum children, “Mum,” as she was known, was the one everyone sought out in the community. There wasn’t much she wasn’t involved in and there wasn’t much she didn’t know about. That made her the go-to gal in southern Chester County, where she was able to preserve more than 30,000 acres of pristine farmland, forests and streams. All that strength was her core – or as her son, Buzz said, “she was like a steel fist in a velvet glove.”

Hannum was a well-known huntsman, field master and horsewoman her entire life, but she would scoff at the notion of being a feminist. In 2007, someone not familiar with hunting asked her if she should be called Mistress of the Hunt, instead of the proper title of Master. “No! I took the title from my father. He was the Master and then I became the Master. There’s no male-female title,” she responded.

Master Hannum died early this year at the age of 90. But her legacy will live on for her incredible contributions to the hounds, horses and open spaces of southern Chester County.