Shooting, fishing turn to hobbies
Fishing and shooting once were necessary for putting food on the table. As people moved away from the need to fish and hunt, many lost the ability to use the tools once critical to their existence.
In the latter half of the 19th century, Americans became interested in retaining those skills for recreation. The World Shooting Championships began in 1897 and the International Shooting Union was founded 10 years later. Clubs devoted to teaching these skills, and providing safe environments to practice them, proliferated.
In Jamestown, the first organization was the Diamond Spring Rifle Club founded in 1911 under the auspices of William Arnold, Jesse Tefft and Harry Stubbs. A rifle range was fitted on the Clarke property between Southwest Avenue and Spring Street. Weekly shoots, organized with up to 15 men, continued until America’s entry into World War I in 1917.
The hiatus lasted until December 1937 when the Jamestown Rod & Gun Club Inc. was chartered. Fishing interested the members as much as shooting. One of the first prizes offered by the club was a pole for surf fishing awarded for the largest bass caught during the 1938 season.
Although activity died down during World War II, it rebounded immediately when the club built a 600-square-foot clubhouse on the south side of North Main Road — then called Narragansett Street — near Park Street in Conanicut Park. Plans were made for a .22-caliber target range and skeet shooting.
In 1949, differences between the club and the state led the club’s president, Norman Olson, to solicit the town council for help. He wanted to convince fish and game wardens to declare skunks as pests rather than protected fur-bearing animals. The club had released 50 hen and 10 cock pheasants and the skunks were killing the chickens and eating the eggs.
“It is not much use to try and protect wild game if skunks are allowed to continue to roam at large,” he said.
Olson also asked for seven additional special police officers to patrol land posted by the club during the hunting season. The club objected to men who came to Jamestown with a dozen or more dogs and shot everything in sight from chickadees to rabbits.
Four years later, they protested a new state law allowing pheasant shooting in Jamestown. The club had an ongoing project, backed by the town, to release up to 200 young pheasants each year. This was partially to increase the pheasant population for future sport and partially to reduce the wood tick problem.
Fishing also had political ramifications. State Sen. Alton Head Jr. came to the club in 1954 to discuss the “Act for the Protection and Conservation of Striped Bass in the State of Rhode Island.” He agreed to present an amendment to the bill to prohibit the sale of striped bass by sport and commercial fishermen.
In the 1960s, an affiliated organization, Jamestown Hunters and Shooters, began organizing shoots on the island. The shoots seem to have been more varied than those sponsored by earlier clubs: .22 rifle, .22 pistol, large-bore rifle, big-bore pistol, skeet, and trap shoots were all sponsored between 1963-75.
The club used ranges at Fort Wetherill, on Commerce Oil land to the west of North Main Road and the Botelho farm. In addition, the club sponsored courses in safe gun handling with instructors qualified by the New England Rifle Association.
Through the 1970s, the club slowly lost the use of the ranges. Fort Wetherill ceased to be a military preserve and became a state park in 1972. Development of East Passage Estates near the Botelho farm range began in 1977 and proposals for development of West Reach on the Commerce Oil land were put forth in 1978.
The Jamestown Rod & Gun Club died in 2002. Some private ranges remained, however, until 2017 when the town council banned all recreational shooting in backyards with a caveat that air rifles, blank pistols and BB guns were permitted.
