Haliburton’s Evidence
Judge Thomas Chandler Haliburton
Because he is so well known these days for his wise sayings like “Quick as a wink”, “A stitch in time saves nine”, “Truth is stranger than fiction”, Windsor’s Haliburton is still the most commonly quoted author in America.
He is generally known as The Father of American Humor. Born in Windsor in 1796 and educated at King’s College, he became a lawyer, judge, writer and entrepreneur.
A member of the Nova Scotia Legislative Assembly, he was also a business man and one of the first to ship gypsum to the U.S. from Canada’s third busiest Port of Registry, Windsor, N.S.
In 1829 he wrote the first History of Nova Scotia, and also created the fictional character, Sam Slick, an itinerant American Clockmaker. In a four volume book, The Attaché, or, Sam Slick in England, published in 1844, Haliburton reminisced about life as a student at King’s College, Windsor, at the turn of the century and gave us evidence of the origin of Ice Hockey.
… “you boys let out racin’, yelpin’, hollerin’ and whoopin’ like mad with pleasure; and the playground, and the game at bass (base) in the fields or hurley on the long pond on the ice, or campin’ out a-night at Chester lakes to fish.”…
Skating was the favorite winter sport of the King’s College boys, that is, until they started playing “Ice Hurley”! Long Pond has a long centre section for regular games by the older boys, and two smaller end areas for younger boys to skate and practice stick-handling. It was probably for these reasons that it became the favorite place for Ice Hurley, and Haliburton’s reason for referring to it as the long pond, other, nearby ponds being more or less egg-shaped.
NOTE: “games at bass (base) in the fields”, mentioned in the Haliburton quote, refers to the old English game of ‘Rounders’ that the boys were playing. At the time that Hurley was developing into Ice Hockey in Nova Scotia, Rounders went on to develop into the ‘Massachusetts Game’, the ‘Town Game’ and eventually to ‘Baseball’ in New York state.
The towns of Windsor, Nova Scotia, the Birthplace of Hockey and Cooperstown, New York, the Home of Baseball became “Twin Towns” on Aug. 19, 1996.