Early records of the Daniel Boone Gun Club and its founding have long been lost. We have accounts of the early days of the club by word of mouth from one of the founders, and a descendant of one of the founders.
The Daniel Boone Gun Club started in or about 1943 as a group of war workers and shooters too young or too old for the draft gathered near Pigeon Creek, not far from Stringtown Road, to shoot black powder rifles. The outcome of World War II was still in doubt at the time, and “modern” ammunition simply wasn’t readily available on the home front.
In the years after the war, the black-powder shooters merged with a group of local police officers who were shooting together as the “Pocket City Shooters”. In 1955 Daniel Boone Gun Club was incorporated in the State of Indiana and chartered as an NRA club.
The exact order of events is unclear, but it was in the early post-war years that George Bevin, who was one of the early black-powder shooters and who had worked at Chrysler Ordinance during the war, helped to arrange the purchase of part of Dick Porter’s farm for a shooting range. The members of the club came together to build a shooting range on that property.
Perhaps influenced by the form of competition familiar to the old Pocket City shooters, the form the range took on the small piece of land available was that of a bullseye shooting range with sixteen, twenty-five and fifty-yard stations, and with a few stations for shooting rifles at one-hundred, two-hundred, and three-hundred-yard ranges. This arrangement also worked nicely for the black-powder shooters, who normally shot at twenty-five, fifty, and one-hundred-yard range.
Several generations of shooters used that original facility. Families grew up attending events and social gatherings there, and bullseye shooting teams traveled from Daniel Boone to compete in matches all over the mid-west and at the Nationals at Camp Perry, Ohio. Daniel Boone Gun Club hosted bullseye matches that drew in competitors from all over the country, including Army, Navy, State Police, and County and local police organization teams. During that period the Daniel Boone Gun Club men’s and women’s teams won several State titles, and Daniel Boone has produced quite a number of individual State Champions, both men and women, in Indiana and surrounding states.
The Club became affiliated with the Civilian Marksmanship Program (CMP) and held a few high-power rifle matches to qualify members to purchase M1 Garands and M1 Carbines from the CMP at very low prices, even for the times. Daniel Boone Gun Club is still a CMP affiliate, and members can still purchase surplus arms and other items from the CMP.
During the 2000-2003 period, the state decided to widen State Route 62. Much of the club’s original land was lost to the road expansion, but the club was able to purchase the site it now occupies from the farmer who owns the fields to the west of the range. Club members again came together to build a new range facility, this time with the help of some important contributions from Irving Materials, Inc. (IMI)(concrete), and Hobgood Post Frames (structures). Other structures have been added in the years since, and crews of members still do most of the maintenance and upkeep work at the range.
Today the Daniel Boone Gun Club range is a single-use facility. It is a single range with target points at 25, 50, 100, and 200 yards, all using a common firing line. There is no provision for operating any part of the range independently from other parts of the range. Flooding during late winter and early spring assures that there will always be plenty of work to do, and limits what can be done with the range property, while the size of the range property and the parking area make a cap on the number of members and potential users of the range necessary.
Daniel Boone Gun Club still hosts NRA and CMP precision pistol competitions every season, and members have made adaptations that allow for the occasional hosting of precision rifle competitions. There are club-centered competitions from time to time, and members who have a passion for a form of shooting competition suited to the existing range property are welcomed to step forward and share their ideas and their talents.
Currently, the membership cap is set at three-hundred (300) members. The membership cap is set by vote of the membership. Limited parking and shooting facilities go into the decision of where that cap should be set, along with usage patterns and other factors that change from time to time. Members must be at least eighteen (18) years of age, of good repute, citizens of the United States of America, members of the NRA, never convicted of a crime of violence and not legally barred from possession or use of firearms, and not a member of any organization that has as one of its purposes the overthrow by force and violence the Government of the United States or any of the political subdivisions.