Living by the River St. John
In about 1859, James A. Whelpley of New Brunswick developed a skate that was well suited for long distance skating on the bays and lakes of southern New Brunswick. It was called the Long Reach skate, after Long Reach, a section of the Saint John River, between Oak Point and Westfield where the Whelpley family operated a factory manufacturing the skates. The skate had a steel blade about 40 cm long on a wooden platform that was attached by leather straps to normal boots. The skates were packed for export to Great Britain and the United States in wooden apple barrels. The staves of the barrels were sawn from local wood and the binding hoops around the barrels were made of split birch saplings. At one time there occurred a slip-up with a screw that held the skate to the shoe. It fell out and the business folded from customer disgust at the faulty screw. Today on the Jerusalem Road about two miles up river from us, a friend recently found the uneven ground which marked the factory. The Whelpley family continued to make the Long Reach skates in New Brunswick until about 1886, when the factory was moved to Keene, New Hampshire.
I began river skating using tubular long reach racing skates riveted to a leather skate boot. They were beautiful. You could take long strokes and glides for long periods. Later I ‘graduated’ to hockey tubular skates and they required a choppy, short stroke and the carefree season of skating was over. On the river ice there were large expanses of hard ice, but every so often there were ‘frost-cracks’ which would move up and down with the ocean tide changes, sometimes as much as a couple of inches. You had to be careful skating into the edge of the crack or skating off with a sudden drop off the end of the huge ice-sheet.
I had thought many times of building an ice sailer using skates as runners and an actual sail to provide movement. For the rudder, a skate with a tiller on the stern would provide steerage. I was always afraid of hitting the frost cracks at high speed. Though I have seen some ice ‘boats’ on the river, friends of mine who sail on Grand Lake have less problems with the ice cracks than we do in the tidal estuary.
Long Reach Skates
In about 1859, James A. Whelpley of New Brunswick developed a skate that was well suited for long distance skating on the bays and lakes of southern New Brunswick. It was called the Long Reach skate, after Long Reach, a section of the Saint John River, between Oak Point and Westfield where the Whelpley family operated a factory manufacturing the skates. The skate had a steel blade about 40 cm long on a wooden platform that was attached by leather straps to normal boots. The skates were packed for export to Great Britain and the United States in wooden apple barrels. The staves of the barrels were sawn from local wood and the binding hoops around the barrels were made of split birch saplings. At one time there occurred a slip-up with a screw that held the skate to the shoe. It fell out and the business folded from customer disgust at the faulty screw. Today on the Jerusalem Road about two miles up river from us, a friend recently found the uneven ground which marked the factory. The Whelpley family continued to make the Long Reach skates in New Brunswick until about 1886, when the factory was moved to Keene, New Hampshire.
I began river skating using tubular long reach racing skates riveted to a leather skate boot. They were beautiful. You could take long strokes and glides for long periods. Later I ‘graduated’ to hockey tubular skates and they required a choppy, short stroke and the carefree season of skating was over. On the river ice there were large expanses of hard ice, but every so often there were ‘frost-cracks’ which would move up and down with the ocean tide changes, sometimes as much as a couple of inches. You had to be careful skating into the edge of the crack or skating off with a sudden drop off the end of the huge ice-sheet.
I had thought many times of building an ice sailer using skates as runners and an actual sail to provide movement. For the rudder, a skate with a tiller on the stern would provide steerage. I was always afraid of hitting the frost cracks at high speed. Though I have seen some ice ‘boats’ on the river, friends of mine who sail on Grand Lake have less problems with the ice cracks than we do in the tidal estuary.
December 31st, 2009 at 1:11 pm
My great-grandfather was the brother of James Whelpley and my mother, Dorothy Simpson, was asked to attend and unveil a commemorative plaque for the skate factory that hangs in the Jones Creek Hall. My sister and I accompanied her on the trip east for the event. The Whelpley long reach skate is also on display at the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto.