OGDENSBURG — Nearly 50 vendors will take part in Saturday’s fifth annual Ogdensburg Sportsmen’s Show, with a wide range of displays and products including hunting and fishing boats, ATVs and apparel, sports equipment and memorabilia, fishing rods and lures, decoys, game calls, country and wildlife-themed crafts and decor, maple products, jerky rubs, and raffles and refreshments.

Many familiar vendors and several new ones will take part in the event, which runs from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Edgar A. Newell II Memorial Dome at Ogdensburg Free Academy.

Highlights of the day include a rifle raffle for a .50-caliber T.C.B. collector inline muzzle-loader, hunting dog demonstrations by Kenny Tynon of the River Valley Gun Dog Club at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., FISHCAP’s Don Meissner, and carving demonstrations by Terry McKendree of Buck Ridge Chainsaw Carving throughout the afternoon, according to Sandra M. Porter, executive director of the Greater Ogdensburg Chamber of Commerce, the organization responsible for the show.

The taxidermy exhibit this year will be Fur Bearers of the North Country, provided by chamber member Kim M. Demers, and featuring animals stuffed by local taxidermist Lawrence H. Vielhauer.

“Today, every trapper you see is old, but it didn’t used to be that way,” Mr. Demers said. “When I was younger, there’d be 10 kids in every two-block area interested in trapping.”

When Mr. Demers was a youngster growing up in Ogdensburg, he discovered the tradition of trapping in his grandmother’s attic.

“My brothers and I found some traps hanging from the rafters in the ceiling. They were huge! Surely they must be bear traps. We ran downstairs to tell my father what we had found,” Mr. Demers said.

The traps the Demers boys had come across were actually their father’s old beaver traps, and at that moment, in the spring of 1961, Kim, then 9, and his brothers, Mike, 8, and Paul, 10, were hooked, or trapped, so to speak. Their father told the boys that if they wanted to be trappers, they should start with muskrats. He drove them over to get traps from local legend E.J. Dailey, who sold supplies.

That first year, the boys’ efforts yielded just nine muskrats, but the highlight of the season was a double catch on the last day.

Trapping, Mr. Demers said, gets in your blood. Last year, more than 50 years since those first nine muskrats and enjoying a year away from the Medicine Place, a drugstore he owns on State Street, Mr. Demers said, he trapped, hunted or fished every day from mid-October to mid-December..

Admission to the sportsmen’s show is $4 for adults, $3 for active military, and $2 for children 10 to 18. A family rate is offered at $12 and children under 10 get in free.

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