At first look, Charles M. Jobin '01 and Caton M. Burwell '99 might be mistaken for models in an Eddie Bauer or J. Crew catalog--not the kind of guys who carry a shotgun on the weekends.

No faded flannel shirts or burly beards here.

Despite their clean-cut, preppy looks, the two are co-presidents of the Harvard Shooting Club, a 116-year-old organization that is seeing its membership increase after two years of dormancy.

The group now has 15 members and a newly launched Web site.

Still, Jobin and Burwell--who spent part of their childhoods on shooting outings with their families--say they have to explain to people that their club is not one for gun aficionados.

Instead, they say the club helps promote the sport of shooting, and they teach people how to do it safely.

"The point of the club is not to get together a bunch of people who love guns," Burwell says.

"It's pretty interesting that for such an intellectual, open, and enlightening institution such as Harvard...generally most people call it the gun club, and [that] has a negative connotation," Burwell adds.

A Hundred Years of History

It would seem as if the Shooting Club, which was founded in 1883, should have a wealth of history. But other than a book of shooting records, the club's history is obscured.

"I regret that, to my knowledge, there were never any records of the Harvard Shooting Club during the time I was connected with it," Richard Bullock, a member of the club in the 1800s, once wrote about the organization.

Bullock's words are now one of the few pieces of information saved at the Harvard Archives on the shooting Club. The small collection at the Archives also includes photographs, pamphlets, certificates, menus from club banquets and letters from the Shooting Club's earliest years.

According to information at the archives, the club had its own shooting range through the 1800s.

And during the early 1900s, club members had their own clay-pigeon trap near a swamp between Soldiers Field and the River.

During those times the Shooting Club competed against similar clubs at other Ivy League Schools. The club chose never to call itself the "shotgun team," though, because it did not want its acronym to the confused with that of the swimming team, according to a letter written by Nathaniel Nash '07, who was the club's captain in 1906.