TWENTY-FIVE YEARS A BUILDING
The club was founded in 1929 on the cornerstone of wildlife
conservation. Its original members were all outdoorsmen
interested in protecting the sport and the life which they
loved. Committees were formed and offices created; the
Weymouth Sportsmen’s Club came into being.
Money was raised by the club by means of sponsoring field
trials and hare stakes, fishing contests, sports field days,
raffles and financial drives of every description. Pheasants
were originally purchased and released into new cover; trout
were purchased every spring in increasing numbers and
released into waters of Swamp and Weir Rivers, Whitman’s
Pond, the Plymouth River and Cushing Pond. The residential
growth of Weymouth and the surrounding community was met by
the club with a corresponding increase in club membership
and an accelerated drive to preserve the natural beauty and
the resources of its diminishing wildlife habitat.
It is one of the few clubs in Massachusetts to sponsor,
organize and sustain a Sportsmen’s Club of the youth, the
Junior Weymouth Sportsmen’s Club; it was one of the first to
conduct a children’s fishing rodeo by means of which it
teaches and encourages the thrills of outdoor sports in our
younger generation. The name of the Weymouth Sportsmen’s
Club has been at the forefront of every movement which has
as its object the improvement of our hunting and fishing;
for this reason it has been affiliated with the sportsmen’s
representative groups such as the Norfolk County League of
Sportsmen and is a charter member of the more recently
organized Massachusetts Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs.
After twenty-three years of renting halls and meeting
“without a home”, as the veteran member John Cullivan
phrased it, the membership decided to build a clubhouse and
work began in 1952 on the club grounds off Front Street. The
clubhouse, now completed, can serve as a model headquarters
for sportsmen. It incorporates a meeting hall, an indoor
rifle and pistol range, a game room, a cloak room and
executive office. In the rear of the clubhouse the archery
committee has constructed a roving range for enthusiasts of
the bow.
The land on which the club was built was donated by Helene
and Lawrence G. Lambros, wife and son in honor of George
Lambros an active sportsman who died in 1943. The family
lived in the historic Reed House which was built in 1760 at
683 Front Street.
We of the Weymouth Sportsmen’s Club can take rightful pride
in our organization and the men associated with it and this
pause to briefly review its background and growth may serve
to further inspire us to continue this work in the same
tradition of conservation and the protection of our wildlife
heritage. This pause is a momentary glance backward over the
past twenty-five years; may it serve to inspire us to keep
this tradition alive.
