By Porter Lang
Start with the gear. A skate is a blade, a plate and a way of holding the plate to a boot. Before the 1860s, the common way of holding it was a strap. Parks Canada’s record of Starr Manufacturing Company, in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, says the company’s Acme Spring Skate, patented in the 1860s, is regarded as the most important advance in nineteenth-century skate design. The plaque cites improved safety, durability and performance.
That is a large claim, so it is worth laying out who says what, and where the sources stop.
What Parks Canada says
The site record for the Starr Manufacturing Company lists a designation date of June 8, 2007, under the Historic Sites and Monuments Act. It calls Starr one of the leading ice skate manufacturers in the world and says it held that place for about three-quarters of a century. It also says the company’s equipment designs and marketing helped establish ice skating and hockey as Canada’s favourite winter recreations.
A separate Parks Canada release, now archived, reports that on February 22, 2012 a plaque was unveiled at the Dartmouth Sportsplex Arena commemorating Starr as a national historic event. That release adds that Starr was one of the top ice skate manufacturers in the world until the 1930s, and that it produced John Forbes’ Patent Spring Skate, “considered the best ice skate of its time”. It says continual design innovation improved skating performance and prompted further innovation.
The release also says Starr took up the distribution of hockey sticks, which Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia had hand-carved since the mid-nineteenth century, and that when demand grew quickly Starr made its own factory version based on the original. We report that as Parks Canada states it and go no further.
None of the Parks Canada pages we read gives the company’s founders, an exact patent year, or production totals. They also never mention an “Acme Club” skate, and we have not used that name anywhere.
Parks Canada is the source for this piece. The Dartmouth Heritage Museum holds a skate collection; check its own pages for what is on show.
Dates in order
- June 8, 2007 (Parks Canada): the Starr Manufacturing Company is designated.
- February 22, 2012 (Parks Canada): a plaque is unveiled at the Dartmouth Sportsplex Arena.
What the sources do not say
They do not give the number of workers. They do not give export figures. They do not say what a Starr skate cost in its time, and we would not print a price in any case. They do not describe the mechanism beyond “spring-lock”. They do not tell us how many skates survive, or where. The Dartmouth Heritage Museum says its skate collection remains, and that is the only place the sources point to for seeing skates.
What kind of sources these are
Parks Canada is a government heritage body and its plaque text is short and careful. The Dartmouth Heritage Museum is local and more detailed but cites secondary sources. Neither is a patent record. A patent search would settle the dates and the 1873 and 1939 lines, and it is the next step if anyone wants them fixed.
Why it belongs on a travel site
Because a skate is a good reason to go to a rink in a place you have never been, and because a nail factory turning into a world skate maker is the sort of story a town keeps. A plaque at the Dartmouth Sportsplex Arena remains.
What we left out
Personal details about the people involved beyond the dates above, the houses built by Forbes and a production manager, and the factory’s other products. Prices of any kind are out as well.
Roam first. Shop later.