History of the Hamburg Rod & Gun Club

The following history of this club was given to me by Royal Momberger, a long time member and past president of the club. A photo (still in the club) of a game dinner taken in 1924 shows Roy as a young man at this dinner.

“The club was first started in 1924 and only Trap shooting was done. Skeet shooting came many years later. The club was considered a Conservation Club, trap shooting was done in those days just for the practice before the hunting season began. After hunting season was over, a game dinner was held and then there wasn’t any activity until the following hunting season. The original club was made up of businessmen from Hamburg and the surrounding villages. You had to be sixteen years old and have a hunting license to get in the club. The first game dinner in 1924 was held in the Odd Fellows Temple located on Buffalo Street just across the street from the movie theater. I was one of the young kids that waited on the tables.

During the hunting season, some of the members put up a shanty at the west end of the fairgrounds and had one trap and they also had hand traps. They were practicing shooting for hunting season. They all loaded their own shells using brass cases and black powder.

If my memory serves me correctly, the original club broke up after five or six years. Nothing was started again until a group of younger men my age built a shanty on the old B & S right-a-way, it crossed Newton Road just a short distance from E. Main Street. All we had was a single trap and some targets set up for the rifle and pistol shooters. The only meeting held were at the shanty and to my knowledge no records were kept. This club only lasted a couple of years and the club was disbanded until years later when Art Vara came to town. Art and a group of young hunters got together. I, my brother Ed, Louis Sheff, Harry Wiltse, Bed Pickup, Walt Zimmerman and a few more I don’t remember, organized the club again. The club grew real fast until we had about 75 members. The first couple of years we used to meet in a hotel, which is now gone, located in the triangle at Clark Street and Buffalo Street. The gun club in those days was a well known civic organization. Every year for about five years we had a Gun Club Day in Hamburg. We had a parade through the village and ran the fair for four days in back of the hotel.

We used to run two raffles a year for shotguns and rifles, which was a way to get enough money to build a club house off McKinley Parkway, on the Lester Burgward property. I don’t remember the date. We got a 99 year lease on the property off McKinley opposite the Fairgrounds. We built a club house, a building about 30 by 40 feet. It had a huge kitchen with a wood cook stove and the rest of the building was a meeting room. Our toilet was an outhouse in the back of the building. We had no water until we later drilled a well. The heat was a big potbelly wood burning stove. One Trap field was built and a year later a Skeet field. There was no night shooting, only daytime on Saturday and Sunday.

When the McKinley Parkway club was built, skeet and trap shooting was secondary. The name of the club then was the Hamburg Conservation, Rod & Gun Club. Most of the club activity at that time was conservation. The Hamburg club was one of the founders of the Erie County Conservation Society. Art Vara and a few of our members got that society going. We had about 30 clubs in the area that sent 5 to 10 members to the monthly meeting held in Buffalo. In those days that organization got to be very powerful in the setting of the conservation laws in New York State, such as license fees, hunting laws and the John White State Pheasant Farm.

Oh yes, something more about the present club on Hickox Road. When we broke our lease on the McKinley site, we started looking for a new location. We finally found the land on Hickox Road. Eighteen of the old members each gave $100 that added to what we got for breaking our lease on McKinley gave us a start to purchase the present property in 1953.

At the time we decided to build the building we had about 80 members, but like it is now, nobody cared about doing the work. About 10 of the members pitched in and we got things going. I drew the plans and supervised the construction of the original building. A few years later, the pistol range was added. George Hill, who was in the concrete business, supervised all that work.

I must say we would never had the building we have now if it wasn’t for the Bethlehem Steel Corp., Lackawanna Plant. It was through my connections with some of the high officials of the plant that they gave us the material amounting to at least $20,000. Just some things to get us started, 1500 yards of slag, 15 built-up roof trusses made to suit the width of our building for $25.00 each delivered and erected. Five tones of steel roof decking were delivered for nothing, all the toilet fixtures, paint, steel poles for trap and skeet field lighting, enough cable to wire one skeet and trap field were free, and the list goes on. Other companies such as the Federal Portland Cement Co., Reifler Bros. Concrete Block Co., and Niagara Mohawk Power Co., in Tonawanda, Bud Lickliter, Earl Abbot did the furnace and duct work. Building indoor lights by member Walt Zimmerman and the list goes on. Most of the above items were donated or bought at cost. As time went on, and more material was needed, Bethlehem Steel always made it possible to get it through the plant.

We were the first club in the state to have lights for night shooting, and shooters from all over the country came to see what night shooting was like.”

That’s all for now, as told to John Markert by Roy Momberger.