Hockey researchers rag the puck back to 1796 for earliest-known portrait of a player

Sport historians Carl Giden and Patrick Houda have also unearthed an extremely rare book published in 1776 that includes the first detailed description of field hockey. 

Two Swedish researchers compiling an encyclopedia of hockey history have scored a hat trick of significant new discoveries, including what they’re calling the earliest known image of a hockey player — a well-dressed skater with a curved stick and flat-edged puck striding along England’s ice-covered Thames River in December 1796.

Sport historians Carl Giden and Patrick Houda have also unearthed an extremely rare book published in 1776 that includes the first detailed description of field hockey — ancestor of dozens of derivative sports, from NHL hockey to ringette to the underwater game of “octopush” — as well as another vintage illustration of a group of boys at play that’s considered the earliest of its kind.

The engraving of the Thames River skater came to the researchers’ attention after a U.S. collector purchased it from an antique shop in Maine. Though the image was printed in 1797, Giden and Houda believe the scene depicted took place in December 1796, when a spell of unusually cold weather swept across Britain and froze rivers and ponds throughout Greater London.

Juvenile Sports and Pastimes, by Richard Johnson, London, 1776

The information given in Juvenile Sports and Pastimes strengthens the view that hockey was first played by boys in the London schools during the mid-1700s, and from there spread over the rest of the British Empire.

This website also has a picture dated England (1796). This too connects them to Europe’s hockey in its infancy.

— Researched and Compiled by Patrick Houda and Dr. Carl Giden

 This London book hides the first known contemporary use of the word hockey which predates earlier findings by 25 years. Johnson’s work describes a number of games for children and includes the chapter “New Improvements on the Game of Hockey”. In six pages the author gives the rules of the game and hints about how to make the best hockey-sticks, goals and bungs. This chapter also has the first known illustration of the game on ground.

Besides this – the book gives even earlier references to the game – as Johnson tells how he played hockey during his own school-days in the 1740s.

The information given in Juvenile Sports and Pastimes strengthens the view that hockey was first played by boys in the London schools during the mid-1700s, and from there spread over the rest of the British Empire.

The picture’s background even contained a clue — a distinctive obelisk situated on the riverbank behind the skater — that allowed the Swedes to pinpoint the location of the scene as a bend of the Thames near the Kew Observatory west of downtown London.

A second boy seen lacing up his skates is believed to be sitting on the edge of Islesworth Ait, a large, teardrop-shaped island in the middle of the river.

“In 1797, the word ‘hockey’ had been used in London and its surroundings for about 50 years, replacing the medieval term ‘bandy ball,’ ” the researchers write in an article recently added to their ever-expanding online compendium of hockey history. “The artist’s intention must have been to picture a pair of skating hockey-players. Later similar paintings are not known until the 1850s.”

Giden told Postmedia News that the image is a “very important discovery,” not only because it’s “the first engraving of hockey on skates” but because it shows a puck — “or as it was called at this time, a ‘bung,’ probably made of cork or wood.”

Bungs are stoppers or plugs used to cover the circular openings in barrels of rum or other liquids. These objects were known to have been used by shinny players in the 19th century until rubber hockey pucks were introduced in Canada in the late 1800s.

The 1776 publication, titled Juvenile Sports and Pastimes, contains a “very careful description” of field hockey, said Giden, providing an unprecedented account of a traditional recreational activity that was, by this time, coalescing into a more formalized sport.

The book’s references to the word “hockey” — to name the game as well as the object of pursuit, a small ball — represent “the first known contemporary use of the word ‘hockey’ — predating later records by about 25 years,” the researchers note.

An 1835 painting by John O’Toole depicts skaters with sticks and bung on a frozen stream in the American state of West Virginia. The picture connects the Jones Family to the Philadelphia area where early hockey was played. The picture shows hockey being played on a frozen lake in the US state of Virginia. This connects the family to a knowledge of hockey (the stick).

Meanwhile, the woodcut image of five field hockey players is described as “the first known illustration of the game.”

Giden and Houda, both members of the Canadian-based Society for International Hockey Research, have posted their latest findings at the group’s website.

The work of the Swedish researchers, powered by their determined digging through digitized historical documents, has added rich layers in recent years to earlier chronicles of hockey’s evolution, such as the 2006 book How Hockey Happened by SIHR founder Bill Fitsell, a well-known journalist and author from Kingston, Ont.

Images of people playing ground games with curved, hockey-like sticks go back to antiquity. And Dutch painters as early as the 16th century show scenes with skaters carrying sticks and hitting a ball — possibly playing a golf-like game on ice called kolv.

But hockey researchers distinguish between such traditional pastimes and the more formalized forms of ground and ice games that seemed to coalesce as field hockey in the mid-1700s and later as ice hockey. (When the Jones family was living in Pennsylvania).

These locations of Pennsylvania and England connect the Jones family with the “idea” of hockey.

In 2009, a painting by pioneer New Brunswick artist Helen Maria Campbell — dated to the early 1830s — was hailed as a potential contender for world’s earliest picture of ice hockey.

It showed a scene on the frozen Saint John River near Fredericton that included a skater with his stick on the ice. “It’s fascinating,” Fitsell said at the time. “This is the earliest painting of British troops skating with something that looks like a hockey stick.” Fitsell has shown in his research that the ice version of field hockey originated in England as “hockey-on-the-ice” and was transported to North America in the late-18th and early-19th centuries by British troops stationed overseas. The latest findings, said Giden, reinforce Britain’s significance as an important incubator for hockey’s fledgling phases.

Early Hockey Facts 

Did you know that the first recorded game

on ”steel skates” was in 1783 New York City?(Collect Pond)

“Nothing can exceed in brilliancy and animation the prospect it presented on a fine winter day, when the icy surface was alive with skaters darting in every direction with the swiftness of the wind, or bearing down in a body of pursuit of the ball driven before them by their hurlies.”

Then later in Philadelphia when

”an ice stick-and-ball game named “hurly”  played on the frozen Schuylkill river as early as 1785.U.S. Naval hero, Stephen Decatur, playing “hurly” 15 years before the town of Windsor, Nova Scotia claims to have invented it.”

(Pictured up above is a painting of Ice Hurley done by John O’Toole in 1833 in Virginia.)

Also in the late 18th century (1786)

“Princeton, however, was more fond of “shinny,” known also as “hawkey” and hurley,” played with a hard ball and sticks having curved ends. The goals consisted of North College and the fence on the south side of the “campus.”

“The diary of 1786 contains several valuable allusions to College sports ” hockey on Stony Brook in winter, shinny, quoits, ‘ ‘ baste ball, ‘ ‘ and *’ prison baste ” on the campus in the spring and summer.”

(painting of shinny on the ice Morristown,NJ circa 1850)

“In the winter when the weather was cold and the ice firm the student might tuck  his skates under his arm and set out for Stony Brook or the Millstone River. If he were from the north and so at home on the ice, he often joined the other boys in a game played with a ball,  possibly hockey.”

https://jamesdylanlaverance.wordpress.com/ This link will take you to a Blog Site that has an abundance of information on the “hockey” topic.

Do you think hockey was invented in Canada? Think again!

In a new book, a group of hockey historians claims that, contrary to conventional belief, the sport was not invented in Canada in 1875. Instead, its origins like in … (Source: https://goo.gl/67XSBU

Ice Hockey Begins to take shape:

As the transformation of Stick and ball games ( previously played on ice without skates) to stick-ball on ice games with skates started to take place,it’s interesting pointing out some key dates… (Source: https://goo.gl/J5LpAF)

“Now You Know” “The Book of Answers” by Doug Lennox

Did you know… that just before British soldiers fled New York City in 1783 at the end of the Revolutionary War, they reportedly played a game of Irish hurling on skates, and that a version of “hockey” was played in Stoney Brook (today’s Princeton), New Jersey in the winter of 1786? (Source: https://goo.gl/XDWQ5s)

Virginia-Pennsylvania Boundary

Today there is no common border between Virginia and Pennsylvania – but between 1681 and 1863, the southwestern border of Pennsylvania was shared with Virginia. Exactly what territory was Virginia and what was Pennsylvania was a challenge that took a century to resolve.

West Virginia i/ˌwɛst vərˈdʒɪnjə/ 
is a state located in the Appalachian region of the Southern United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Ohio to the northwest, Pennsylvania to the north (and, slightly, east), and Maryland to the northeast. West Virginia is the 41st largest by area and the 38th most populous of the 50 United States. The capital and largest city is Charleston.

The state of Pennsylvania is where the Schantz (Jones) family settled after moving from Germany. These locations of Pennsylvania and England connect the Jones family with the “idea” of hockey.