Time passages

The News
NEW GLASGOW - "This has been my home for a year and a half," says John Ashton, motioning to desk at the New Glasgow library, where day after day he pores over microfilm from old - very old - newspapers.
Sifting through the past is nothing new to Ashton, who a few years ago wrote a book about Raymondville, a 19th-century French settlement in the eastern part of Pictou County, near Trafalgar.
Ashton has been working on a project for the Pictou County Sports Heritage Hall of Fame. He's been collecting data - priceless history - for interpretative panels at the hall.
Ashton has pored over newspaper clippings that date back to 1827, and so far has gotten up to 1943; the Eastern Chronicle, The Colonial Standard (and it's sister publication The Colonial Patriot) and copies of The Evening News on microfilm at the library from 1919 until the mid-1950s.
When he's done, he'll get to work on interpretive panels for the sports hall of fame. "We're trying to categorize how sports evolved in Pictou County, with text, graphics and photos," Ashton says.
He hopes to have the first panel finished by the fall of 2008 - that one on the history of hockey in Pictou County, and there might be a surprise or two in store about Canada's national passion in Pictou County.
But Ashton hasn't been researching just hockey - other sports, too. Among them: basketball, which began in Pictou County just a couple of years after James Naismith invented it; quoits, a game similar to horseshoes; lawn tennis, then a blue-blood sport that found its way to Pictou County in the 19th century (the Mayflower Tennis Club existed in New Glasgow as far back as the 1880s, Ashton says, it's exact location still not discovered during his research).
Sports such as horse racing and cricket used to be popular in this county as well.
"There were grass tennis courts all over Pictou County," Ashton says, ticking off communities such as Hopewell, Bridgeville, Pictou and the River John area.
He also hopes to start building a computer database at the hall. "That will take years to do."
In May, Ashton will help assemble regular articles for The News, and will strap readers in the time machine and take us far back, to when sports in Pictou County was just beginning.
Funding for the Pictou County Sports Heritage Hall of Fame project was provided by local municipal governments, as well as ACOA.