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Historic hunt club continues to rebuild
By ROBERT CONNELLY
ELLSWORTH
Four walls and a roof mark the return of a 100-year-old local hunt club seven months after it was destroyed by fire.
The Mahoning County Coon Hunters Protective Association lost its clubhouse, 9680 Akron-Canfield Road, to a fire in June. After months of dealing with permits and paperwork, the rebuilding has begun, said Todd Schuller, acting club secretary.
“We do hope to have things done by the late spring, early summer,” he said of construction. “We will have the Fall Festival in 2015.”
That festival was canceled last year due to the blaze. It had been planned to celebrate the club’s 100-year anniversary. But that will be commemorated as soon as the new clubhouse is up and in use.
“We will be doing something special this year to kick off the new building,” Schuller noted.
The festival is the group’s biggest fundraiser.
“We had a couple dozen people show up, so the biggest majority knew” it was canceled, said John Jakubec, president of the hunt club, of the fall festival. “Their lots are good for this coming year, no one lost everything, and we will honor what they had.”
Even with the fire and the rebuilding underway, the club still found time to give back to groups during the holiday season.
“A lot of those churches [we support] thought that since this [fire] happened, we wouldn’t be able to donate again to the food banks and everything. But we decided at a meeting we could still do this,” said Jakubec.
“We had commitments to the community as we do every Christmas, and we still fulfilled those,” Schuller said.
In terms of construction, Schuller said costs have been coming in as expected. The blaze tore apart the building, but left a tall fireplace intact. Members of the club had hoped to incorporate the stone from the fireplace — it was deemed unsafe to still stand — but that isn’t possible anymore.
“The stone itself was compromised,” said Schuller. “We can use it as more of a decoration.”
Jakubec echoed Schuller’s opinion that things are going smoothly now that permits and building-code stipulations are being followed and there are walls and a roof up. Jakubec said a break in the weather allowed them to pour the concrete for the inside and now, they are working on enclosing the facility so interior work can be accomplished during the winter.
Small changes will be made to the clubhouse, such as an extended roof over an outdoor patio section, but the set-up will remain the same as before, Jakubec and Schuller said.