Austin Danforth

Free Press Staff Writer

Today the games might have been cancelled.

The conditions, as described by the Free Press, were anything but inviting:

“A strong and piercing cold northwest wind prevailed during the entire day, sweeping the dry snow in great clouds through the streets of the city, banging doors and blinds, carrying away hats, and bringing tears to the eyes of all who ventured to face the gale.”

But why cut short the revelry?

Five days of sledding — better known as “coasting” 130 years ago — down the city streets at breakneck speeds, concerts and dinners, skating, snowshoe races and ice yachting had stranded Burlington on a frozen Cloud Nine.

By the final day of the Burlington Carnival of Winter Sports, Feb. 26, 1886, the only event left was a strange new game from the north — hockey.

On a rink set up between docks at the Central Vermont Railroad wharf, the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association pulled out a late victory over the rival Montreal Crystals in the first game. And while the superior hockey came in that opening match, the second game, pitting the MAAA against the local Van Ness club, was the one that carved out a shard of history.

Barely a decade after the modern game of hockey took root in Montreal, the sport had its first international showdown, the MAAA skating past the Vermonters for a 3-0 win and the carnival championship.

“Everybody always says Canadians brought hockey to the U.S. but where, how?” said Hugo Martinez Cazon, a city resident, environmental engineer for the state and amateur historian. “Here is how.

“Of recorded history, it’s absolutely the earliest international game,” he said.

Devin Colman, an architectural historian for the state, helped vet out Martinez Cazon’s work. A member of the Society for International Hockey Research, Colman quizzed its members on the Burlington game and said he received no argument to the contrary.

“The feedback I got from SIHR was that yeah, nobody else has found an earlier documented game,” Colman said.

“We’re not claiming we discovered this unknown fact. It’s been out there,” Colman said. “But nobody’s really publicized it. We think it’s cool, a neat little claim to fame.”

A Free Press story from the week after the carnival provided loose confirmation of that fact. The hockey games “were the first of the kind that were ever played in this vicinity and it is to be regretted that more of our people could not have witnessed them.”

Martinez Cazon stumbled upon the carnival’s existence while researching the ravine that crossed Burlington in the 19th century. He said the discovery that hockey had been played, in addition to what were then the standard winter sports in the area, “kind of set off an alarm in my head.”

Research into the sport’s origins, which center on Montreal in the 1870s, followed.

Yale University lays claim to introducing hockey at the college ranks. But its ground-breaking game against Johns Hopkins in 1896 happened a full decade after the sport reached the shores of Lake Champlain.

The Quebecois teams’ appearance in Burlington continued an annual series that began at Montreal’s 1883 winter carnival. According to several sources, a smallpox outbreak in the city forced the cancellation of the 1886 event — and Burlington extended the invitation for the players to head south.

That annual series, Martinez Cazon learned in his research, was the precursor to the first Stanley Cup in 1893.

The 30-minute game on the Burlington waterfront seven years earlier even featured four players on that inaugural Cup-winning MAAA squad.

The seven members of the Van Ness team, however, were far from Stanley Cup-caliber.

The Vermonters had never played a game before the carnival and they had practiced only sparingly in the buildup, according to that March 5, 1886 edition of the Free Press.

Even the newspaper took great pains to explain the new sport to its readers — a marker of how foreign it was at the time.

“For the benefit of those who have never seen the game played,” the report reads, “it should be stated that it bears a striking resemblance to polo, the ball instead of being round is round one way and flat the other, like a boys’ cartwheel sawed out of a board …

“The strife is to see which can succeed first in putting the ball into the rival’s goal.”

Around the time Martinez Cazon and Colman were working with Brennan Gauthier, the archaeologist for the Vermont Agency of Transportation, to finalize the research into the contest, a tangible piece of history surfaced.

A winner’s medal –– emblazoned with the initials of the Burlington Coasting Club, which organized the carnival –– was up for auction on a hockey memorabilia website.

The auction house could only reveal that the medal “came from the family of a friend of one of the players,” Colman said. But that was enough.

The trio approached J. Brooks Buxton with their find and the Jericho resident was inspired enough to purchase the artifact as a means of preservation. The auction page said the winning bid went for $4,608.

“It’s not just some random medal from somebody in junior high school who never really made history,” Martinez Cazon said. “This is actually a historic marker.”

The next step that Martinez Cazon and Colman have in mind is a physical marker on the Burlington waterfront, recognizing the site of hockey’s first international game.

But, for now, more supporting evidence is welcome, too.

“There were photographers there, but we haven’t found any pictures of the hockey game,” Colman said. “Is there someone out there who has a random photo album with those black-and-white snapshots? Who knows?”

This story was originally published Feb. 27, 2016. Contact Austin Danforth at 651-4851 or edanforth@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/eadanforth

Austin Danforth