Edna’s Virginia Roast Pheasant with Chestnut Dressing

During Colonial times and throughout the nineteenth century, wild game birds were so abundant and relished in America that Benjamin Franklin suggested we adopt the wild turkey as our national bird. Hunting turkeys, quail, partridge, pheasant, canvasback ducks, and guinea hens was particularly fancied in the South, to such an extent that by the turn of the twentieth century, passenger pigeons were totally extinct and many other species of fowl on the verge of disappearing. O