Frozen in time

The News
PICTOU - The rink has been a community gathering place for generations of Canadians.
The first known rink in this county was built in Pictou in 1872 - between the small streets of Martha and Taylor. Costume skating parties were a popular form of entertainment in that time; skaters with elaborate costumes would take to the outdoor ice on cold winter nights. It was torn down in 1934; a cluster of houses now stand in that area of Pictou.
"It was used for curling and skating - not hockey yet," said John Ashton, who is researching the early origins of sports in Pictou County for the Pictou County Sports Heritage Hall of Fame.
The Shiretown was also home to a rink built in 1939 on Water Street, near the spot where the deCoste Entertainment Centre currently stands. The Hector Arena would be open in 1967.
Ashton's research on New Glasgow's history of skating rinks unearthed the fact that McKay Street was once called Rink Street, named for an outdoor rink that was erected in 1874 between MacLean and Forbes. It stood for 10 years until it was destroyed in a vicious snowstorm in 1884.
"The next year, they built a skating rink on the west side, on the corner of Abercrombie Road and Maple Avenue," said Ashton.
"You can still see the flat area where this rink was located."
The indoor Arena Rink went up in New Glasgow in 1900, where the courthouse presently stands, "and lasted until the 1940s, I believe," said Ashton.
New Glasgow Stadium - now known as John Brother MacDonald Stadium after the late local sportsman radio broadcaster - opened in 1951.
Ashton knows that an outdoor rink was built in the south end of Trenton in 1918, and in 1920, a building that had been occupied by Humphrey Glass Works (in the area of the Town's public works buildings) was taken over, gutted and turned into an indoor rink.
"I'm not 100 per cent sure how long that rink stayed, maybe 20 years," Ashton said.
There was also an outdoor rink decades ago almost directly across from the Trenton post office, while the current Trenton rink was erected 30 years ago, in 1978.
Over in Westville, it was 1899 and Westville residents saw the construction of what at the time was the largest rink east of Montreal. The rink was on Main Street, on what is now the parking lot of the Catholic Church.
It had a regular-sized rink, and a speedskating oval that circled the outside of the boards. It was torched by an arsonist around 1933.
"You could speedskate while they were playing hockey," said Westville historian George Dooley, adding there were two outdoor rinks in the town just up from the indoor rink.
In 1876, a covered rink went up in Stellarton - just past the railway tracks on South Foord - they flooded that rink using water from a nearby brook.
However, it would burn to the ground in 1892, and another outdoor rink was built in 1906. "I think it was somewhere between the current Stellarton Memorial Rink and the Royal Bank," Ashton relates.
There was also an outdoor rink on what is now Albion Ball Field in Stellarton. The Memorial rink opened in 1946, and had the first artificial ice plant in Pictou County.
The Ivor MacDonald Memorial Rink in Thorburn opened in 1974, but a library researcher found that an outdoor rink existed in the village of Thorburn decades before that.
He's also heard of outdoor rinks used in communities such as Hopewell, Scotsburn and Sunny Brae, but believes there must have been many more.
"A lot of those smaller communities must have had outdoor rinks years and years ago."


This is the second in a series of articles on the origins of sports in Pictou County, with the assistance of researcher John Ashton. The Pictou County Sports Heritage Hall of Fame is looking for any information for planned interpretive panels, i.e. photos, sport area locations, memorabilia, posters, programs, new articles, etc.