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The Game of Hockey

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

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Dossier A 03 · a dated event, well recorded

Hockey Re-enactment, February 1999

On 28 February 1999 two matches were played on the ice at Long Pond under what the organisers took to be Halifax rules. Of everything in this archive, the day is the best recorded: a date, teams, a score and a referee.

Long Pond · 28 February 1999

The match card

  1. Youth match King’s-Edgehill School 6 – 1 Halifax Grammar School King’s-Edgehill
  2. Senior match Halifax Wanderers 3 – 3 Windsor Old-Timers Drawn
Date
28 February 1999
Ground
The ice of Long Pond, Windsor, Nova Scotia
Code
Halifax rules, as the organisers understood them
Puck
Wooden
Sticks
One-piece
Goals
Stones, set on the ice
Referee
Blair Hammond, Halifax (guest)
Players in period dress with curved sticks chasing a puck across pond ice.
Re-enactment play on Long Pond, 28 February 1999, under Halifax rules. LP 002/99
A worn, dark rubber puck photographed against a plain background.
One of several old pucks reported to have surfaced after the excavation of Long Pond in the autumn of 1998. LP 008

Object, autumn 1998

The puck from the excavation

The site described this as a “regulation puck”, one of several old pucks it said surfaced when the pond was excavated in the autumn of 1998. No excavation report or dating was published with it.

Statements gathered around it

Three quotations the site placed on this page.

  1. Bill Fitsell

    Hockey historian; former editor, Society for International Hockey Research, Kingston, Ontario

    The vulcanised puck was first defined as one inch thick and three inches in diameter, in Montreal in 1886. Nobody has proven who manufactured and stamped the first regulation disc, though the Montreal Canadian Rubber Co., producing a range of goods by 1875, may have been among the earlier makers.

    A statement about pucks in general, not a date for the object shown.

  2. Dr Alexander H. Beaton

    Secretary, Ontario Hockey Association, writing in 1898

    Nearly 20 years ago hockey, as a scientific sport, was introduced into Upper Canada from Nova Scotia, the latter province being the indisputable home in Canada of this game.

    A contemporary nineteenth-century opinion about Nova Scotia, not about Windsor or this pond.

  3. Brian McFarlane

    Broadcaster and author, quoted in Roy Mayer, Inventing Canada, 1997

    I know of no place in Canada where there is any written evidence of the game being played any earlier.

    It reports what one well-read broadcaster had not found.

The site also cited “The Origin and Evolution of Hockey” by Dr Charles Bruce Ferguson, then provincial archivist (Nova Scotia Journal of Education, 1968).

Adjacent files