Buck Season at Bear Meadows Sunset—The Wider Context
Buck Season at Bear Meadows Sunset—The Wider Context
By Daniel W. Patterson, with help from Brian Lucas and Marlin Sigel
The Bear Meadows Sunset Hunting Camp—one of many such hunting clubs in Pennsylvania—stands in the Rothrock State Forest immediately south of State College and the adjoining town of Boalsburg. All fourteen hunters filmed in 1982 for the Buck Season documentary lived in Centre County—a few in these two towns but more in or near Bellefonte, the county seat twelve miles to the northeast.
Near the close of this film two of the older hunters recapitulate the history of the Bear Meadows Sunset Club. They say that as early as 1898 some of their fathers and grandfathers were hunting together. By 1917 they had built a small lodge in the State Forest, with—according to Brian Lucas, a leader in 2022--a 99-year lease on the property. In 1923 the men enlarged the camp building by adding an ell, but the structure burned in 1937. Some of the hunters still active in the camp when the film was shot helped cut timber in 1938, and in 1939 they themselves with others built the lodge shown in the film. They used chestnut logs. The supply was large. Between 1910 and the 1920s an estimated four billion American chestnut trees had died in the eastern seaboard states and the Midwest from a blight caused by an accidentally introduced Asian fungus. The hunters purposely kept the new lodge they built simple. They wanted to use wood to heat it and cook, got no telephone line, and decided to use power from a generator outside when they wanted lighting. The building could accommodate all fourteen hunters in the film. Brian Lucas said the number of members had by 2022 dropped to eight. The same building still serves them.
In the film several of the men speak sadly of a decline in the deer population of the region. They attribute it to the failure of the forest to produce enough acorns to attract and sustain deer herds. The hunt filmed for Buck Season in Bear Meadows Sunset had a sighting or two of deer but no kill. The filmmakers emphasized the success of hunters in earlier years by drawing on historical photographs from Pennsylvania showing hunters in the early 1900s standing beside multiple deer they had taken. Since colonial days, however, concern over the dropping deer population had been recurrent. A law passed in 1771 banned deer hunting for half a year. In the 1880s a hunter had tracked a buck in the snow for three days before eventually getting his shot. Over the three days he saw only the tracks of this one deer. He worried that he might have killed the last deer in Pennsylvania. He and others began in the 1890s to organize effectively for conservation.
An essay about a Pennsylvania “First State Game Lands Historical Marker” (https://explorepahistory.com/hmarker.php?markerId=1-A-140) offers a brief and overview of the many factors affecting the decline of the deer population caused by overhunting and also by deforestation for farming and timbering that destroyed the deer habitats. It also discusses factors that benefited wild life, such as the forest regrowth, the intentional restocking with deer, elk, beaver, and other animals, and the loss of natural predators. It also explores ways state legislation both helped and hurt. The unexpected American chestnut blight itself permanently destroyed a food supply the deer preferred to acorns—a loss that the hunters filmed at Bear Meadows Sunset would have known about although they did not mention this consequence.
In 2022 Marlin Sigel is the only surviving hunter from the Buck Season film. He says that the men were uneasy about participating in the project because a short time earlier a major news network had broadcast an attack on hunting. He and Brian Lucas report that one hunter—Leonard Tressler—left the Bear Meadows camp and joined another club because he disapproved of the filming, but the other men liked the film.
Marlin says that he and his brother had joined the Bear Meadows Sunset club because their father had been a member. For their own reasons the younger Sigel men withdrew after a few years, and they too joined other hunting clubs. Though we cannot interview the rest of the men in the film all apparently valued their membership. We can glean this and other information about them from obituaries published in the local newspaper, the Centre Daily Times. We learn that a few of the men were related—the two Jacksons were brothers, as were Don, Fred, and Barry Tressler. Dale McClintic’s mother was a Tressler. Most of the hunters were from fairly large families and went on to have a number of children and grandchildren. Some even lived to see great-grandchildren.
All the hunters had attended local high schools and are likely to have known each other from early in their lives. They were companionable, even though they were members of different local churches—Roman Catholic, Lutheran, United Church of Christ, United Methodist, and Baptist. One man—David Weaver—was a lifelong dairy farmer. Dale McClintic began as a farmer but worked during World War II for Titan Metals and afterwards as a plumber for a Tressler firm and later as a bar tender before his retirement in 1978. Marlin Sigel says his own work ranged from grocery to construction. The others mostly used trade skills to make a living. The Jackson brothers were, like their father, stone masons. Fred and Don Tressler were mechanics and their brother Barry an office-equipment repairman. Richard Lindeman worked as a tile setter.
Virtually all except the youngest men had served in the military during either World War II or the Vietnam War. The two Jacksons and Leonard Tressler were in the Navy. Fred McClellan was a Sergeant in the Air Force. Don Tressler was a Sergeant and his brother Barry a Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, where Barry received a Purple Heart and the Vietnam Cross of Gallantry with Palm. Most of the others were in the Army. Don continued to serve after the War as a Sergeant in the National Guard.
In civilian life it was typical of these men to be active in local chapters of multiple fraternal organizations. A paragraph from Barry Tressler’s obituary illustrates this:
“Mr. Tressler was a past commander and life member of the Bellefonte American Legion Post 33 of Bellefonte, a charter member of the Fraternal Order of the Eagles, Aerie No. 4320 of Bellefonte, a member of Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1600 of Bellefonte, Nittany Leathernecks Division of the Marine Corps League, the Undine Fire Company No. 2 of Bellefonte and the Fraternal Order of Police, Bald Eagle Lodge”—a considerable record for a man who died early, at the age of only 47. (And was active as a hunter despite, according to Brian Lucas, having lost one leg.) One of the other hunters also served in the Undine Volunteer Fire Department, a second was in the Loyal Order of Moose, a third in The Elks, and a fourth in the Harris County Fish and Game Association. Two were in the Fraternal Order of Eagles. Three more of the men were in the American Legion, and four more were members of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
In five of the obituaries a family closed the list with a final entry on membership in the Bear Meadows Sunset Hunting Club or Camp, sometimes with an additional comment. Jake Jackson’s family added that “He was an avid hunter and fisherman.” Dale McClintic’s obituary says that he “helped to construct the building currently being used by the club,” a role in which he must have taken pride. In an obituary for Don Tressler his family wrote that he was a “50 year member of Bear Meadows Sunset Hunting Camp. He loved spending time there and hunting and playing poker with his friends and fellow members.” His family closed the obituary with what they believed would please him most, “In lieu of flowers memorial contributions may be made to the Bear Meadows Sunset Hunting Camp.”
