author
Ammon B. Critchfield
1863–1942
Best remembered as the military officer who helped create Camp Perry, he also left a small but revealing body of nonfiction about rifle practice and public training in the early 1900s. His work offers a window into the civic and military thinking of his era.
1 Audiobook
A report on the feasibility and advisability of some policy to inaugurate a system of rifle practice throughout the public schools of the country
by George Wood Wingate, Ammon B. Critchfield, National Board for the Promotion of Rifle Practice
About the author
Born in 1863 and later known as Brig. Gen. Ammon B. Critchfield, he was an American soldier, newspaper editor, and public official whose name is most closely linked with marksmanship programs and military training. Sources consistently connect him with the founding of Camp Perry in Ohio in 1906, and with wider efforts to strengthen shooting instruction in the United States.
As a writer, he is best known for A Report on the Feasibility and Advisability of Some Policy to Inaugurate a System of Rifle Practice Throughout the Public Schools of the Country, a 1907 government report written with George Wood Wingate. That work reflects his practical, reform-minded interest in training, discipline, and national preparedness rather than literary ambition.
Critchfield died in 1942. For listeners and readers today, his importance lies less in a long list of books than in the historical perspective his writing brings: it captures how one influential military figure thought about education, citizenship, and organized rifle practice in the early twentieth century.