The sport of Skeet shooting as we know it today was started back in 1915. A retired Boston businessman, Mr. Charles E. Davies owned the Glen Rock Kennel at Andover, Massachusetts. Charles Davies was an avid gamehunter and a crack shot, a perfectionist who would go to unheard of lengths to improve his consistency with a shotgun. He had two handy assistants, his own son Henry and Henry's friend Bill Foster.

One winter evening in 1915, while sitting at the dinner table Davies and his son got into a discussion about how to systemize a method of shooting at clay targets for game hunting practice. The result was a design for a shooting field which they laid out on the kennel grounds. The design was for a circle with a twenty five yard radius which had twelve positions marked around it's circumference, just like the numbers on a clock face. The clay pigeon trap was staked down at 12 'o clock, each shooter fired two shots from each of the twelve stations. Then he walked to the centre of the clock and fired his last cartridge from his box of 25 at what was a fast incoming target.

For the next few years this sport was avidly practiced by the threesome who dubbed it, "shooting round the clock" and they worked at it hard during the Autumn in readiness for the hunting season.

For safety the "clock" field required about 500 yards square of terrain to accommodate pellets fired in all directions. This was fine until Mr. Davies' neighbour, John Hall, decided to go into the chicken business. As a result a village of white hen houses cropped up in clear view of stations 7 to 11, and half the circle had to be abandoned. The problem was solved by the setting up of a second trap at 6 'o clock. At the same time the stations were re-numbered so that 6 became 1, 12 became 7 and so on for the stations in between, the midfield station became 8. With this arrangement, the same target angles were provided by the semi-circle that the whole clock had previously afforded. Here were the basic elements of a modern Skeet field.

This "half clock" provided excellent field practice, for they were getting shots from all angles, straightaways, crossing shots and incomers, with targets thrown from both right to left and left to right. But slowly they grew aware that there was one field shot their design didn't provide for. This was a bird flying across fifteen feet or so above the ground, a shot that appears to be going slowly downhill as the shooter prepares to fire. Here the targets were not duplicating the field situation, because both traps were at ground level and the targets were shot while still on the rise. To compensate for this an elevated structure was constructed for the trap at Station 1. The "structure" was an Elm trunk about fifteen feet high with the trap fixed atop it.

Elm trunk's have now been discarded! Steel or brick / block built trap houses domineer the scene, housing as a general rule, fully automatic traps. All targets leaving the high house do so at 10' from ground level, whilst the low house targets leave at 3'. During 1926 an announcement appeared in both the, "National Sportsman" and "Hunting and Fishing" magazines, along with a contest that featured a $100 cash prize for the best name for the new game. Mrs. Gertrude Hurlbutt of Dayton, Montana, walked off with the prize for her suggestion of, "Skeet", an old Scandinavian relative of the English word, "shoot". Soon thereafter Skeet fields began to spring up all around the country. It didn't take long for people to catch on to the idea that there were records to be set and broken in this new game. The very year of the launching, H.M. Jackson, Jnr. of Garner, North Carolina became the first man ever to break twenty five targets straight. In the years that followed, skeet became an increasingly popular sport. Today there are skeet fields all over the world, for it is now an Olympic sport as well, along with trapshooting.

Skeet provides the gunner with a wonderful variety of high's, low's, left's, right's, incoming, going away, quartering; target trajectories which, if mastered and regularly practiced, will improve the results of any shooter in the game field as well as on the Sporting Clays circuit.