doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Camp and Wise

I was going through my copy of Bob Himnan's "The Golden Age of Shotgunning" and I was reminded of what must have been quite the gun store in my home town of Stoughton, Wisconsin. From what Hinman writes the store sold one of the very first modern-style shotgun shell reloaders (from the picture the thing looked to be similar to the old Acme reloader) and a pretty good quality (Belgian?) gun called "The Dane". From what I can tell, nobody in Stoughton knows anything about Camp and Wise or about its reloaders and guns. It seems like a lot of lore died with "the old guys". Can anyone enlighten me?

It's a shame that there are virtually no records* of these old sporting good/hardware stores. I suspect the records of sales were destroyed when the store went out of business or the records were deemed to old to be worth keeping anymore. I have factory letters for the following:

A Parker DH - Shipped to W.H Hoegee Company in L.A. Ca. in 1907

A Fox Sterlingworth shipped to Belden Sporting Goods in 1921 (No location available)

*IMO: If,for example, the Sears Roebuck or Simpson Hardware records for the pre-WW II period gun sales were ever to surface it would be a real bonanza. These records would identify who the original purchaser happened to be.
Jim

Jim, Belden Sporting Goods Company, 277 North Street, Pittsfield, Mass. Prolific shotgun seller of the era. Fred G. Belden, proprietor.

Bingo Eightbore:
I bought this Sterlingworth from a long gone gun shop(used of course) in Dalton,MA in 1966. It hadn't wandered too far away.
Thanks for the information.
It was my first decent double and I still have it and at 90 years old it still locks up like a bank vault.
I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile to put together some kind of regisitry of old gun/sporting goods stores here on the forum? You can bet this information isn't available anywhere else.
Jim