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The Game of Hockey

ISSUE 00110 AUG 2026WINDSOR, NS44°59′N 64°08′W

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Long Pond archive · preserved material

The Long Pond Archive

Between about 2000 and 2008 a small website at this address argued that ice hockey began on a pond behind King’s-Edgehill School in Windsor, Nova Scotia. The domain lapsed. What follows is that site’s material, preserved and labelled — six dossiers of photographs, press accounts and quotations, kept as a record of what was published rather than as a verdict on whether it was right.

Several figures skating and playing shinny on the ice of Long Pond.
Shinny on Long Pond. Undated. Preserved from the former home page; no photographer or year was recorded. LP 002

As published Boys playing a game of shinny on Long Pond which is located on Howard Dill's Farm

The files

Six dossiers. Each carries its own plates, its own preserved wording and its own note on what the material will and will not bear.

  • A 01 Hockey evidence unveiled The 1988 Nova Scotia Sport Heritage Centre announcement, the Windsor Mail recollection of 1876 and the Haliburton passage of 1844, as the former site set them out. Quotation ledger
  • A 02 Site of first hockey evidence Two photographs from the day of the 1988 announcement, and the wall of visitor quotations the former site collected around them. Plates and quotations
  • A 03 Hockey re-enactment, 1999 The two matches played on the ice on 28 February 1999 under Halifax rules, and the pucks the former site reported from the 1998 excavation. Event record
  • A 04 School re-enactment teams The King’s-Edgehill and Halifax Grammar School sides, with the team lists exactly as the former site published them. Team lists
  • A 05 Long Pond and its chroniclers Historians, broadcasters and statisticians photographed at the pond, and what each caption does and does not establish. Visits
  • A 06 Hockey Day in Canada, 2002 The broadcast of 5 January 2002, preserved as eight plates with the captions the former site wrote for them. Photo docket

A register of claims, in date order

This is not a history of hockey. It is a list of the dates the former site attached to its own material, with a line on how much weight each one carries. Where a claim is the site’s own, it is described as the site’s own.

  1. 1810 · 1816–18 The dates the former site rested its case on: Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s graduation from King’s College School, and the school years of the anonymous Windsor Mail writer. Dates as published by the former site; not verified here.
  2. 1844 The Haliburton passage in the London periodical Attaché, quoted for the words “hurley on the long pond on the ice”. A real published text. What it proves about organised hockey is contested.
  3. 1876 The Windsor Mail recollection of skating and hurley on Long Pond, quoted at length by the former site. Quoted from a secondary retelling. No page or issue reference was given.
  4. 28 October 1988 The Nova Scotia Sport Heritage Centre press conference at King’s-Edgehill School, announcing documented evidence for Windsor. An event the site photographed. The announcement is its own claim, not a finding of fact.
  5. Autumn 1998 Old pucks reported as surfacing after the excavation of Long Pond. No excavation report, measurement or dating accompanied the photograph.
  6. 28 February 1999 Two re-enactment matches on the ice under Halifax rules, with wooden pucks and stones for goals. A dated event with team lists and photographs. Well evidenced by the capture.
  7. 5 January 2002 The CBC Hockey Day in Canada broadcast from the pond, with an attendance the site put at about 3,000. The broadcast is a matter of record. The attendance figure is the former site’s own.
  8. c. 2000–2008 The site as captured: the pages, captions and photographs preserved in this archive. The capture is the primary source for everything on these pages.

What this archive is, and is not

It is a preservation of one website. Every photograph here was published by that site, at the size it published them; the originals are preserved unmodified in the private source archive and are not re-touched, upscaled or re-cropped. Captions are reproduced where the wording matters and quoted as such, and where the caption asserts something the site could not show, that is said on the plate.

It is not a continuation of Long Pond Hockey Enterprises, and it has no connection to the Dill family, to King’s-Edgehill School, to Halifax Grammar School, to CBC or to any person photographed on these pages. Nobody pictured here has endorsed this publication. Nothing is sold, and the former souvenir pages at /order.html and /form.html have been retired to notices that carry no prices, no address and no order form.

The origins of ice hockey are genuinely disputed among historians, and Windsor’s claim is one of several. This archive takes no position on it. If you want the current, checkable half of this publication instead, the field manual deals in measurements that can be verified against a published rulebook.

Where the material came from

A capture of the former site: nine HTML pages and their images. The sources page lists what was captured, what was carried over, and what was deliberately left in the private source archive — the merchandise photographs, the order artwork, the navigation graphics and a third-party web counter among them.