“Skates! Skates!”

By Teresa Teixeira Greene

To outsiders, Vermont winters bring forth idyllic images of winter sports—skiing, sledding, and ice skating. To Vermonters, the dark days of winter necessitate outdoor activities, both for enjoyment and in desperate attempts to see some sunlight. So, one might think that a relaxing, yet invigorating, winter sport such as ice skating has deep roots in Vermont.

Except, it doesn’t.

The history of ice skates is written in broad sweeps. The oldest known skates date to 1000 BCE and were made of animal bones. They were flat on the bottom and used with poles, like cross-country skiing. Sometime before the 16th century, the bones were replaced with metal runners, and then skates stayed largely the same until the adjustable sole base was invented in the mid-19th century.

In early Vermont, ice skating was largely relegated to an activity for young boys, particularly associated with young scamps skipping school in favor of outdoor play. While the activity was not completely demonized—dry goods stores in the state listed skates among their myriad of metal goods as early as 1815—written mentions of the sport were almost exclusively tales of people falling through the ice and drowning, followed by pleas to mothers not to let their sons onto the ice. Fiction stories used ice skating as an indicator of a boy’s innocence, a man’s slothfulness, and on rare occasions a woman’s “low standing.”

Skating became a more mainstream activity in the mid-19th century. In 1844, Williston & Tyler’s of Brattleboro was the first store to prominently feature skates in an advertisement, leading their list of available goods with the words, “SKATES! SKATES!” in large print. However, it remained the only store to feature the goods for the next decade. The shift of skating from a child’s activity to one that could be enjoyed by all people was, unsurprisingly, led by women. In 1852, Vermont newspapers reported that a group of Bloomerites, suffragists who fought for women’s rights by challenging gender norms, were spotted skating in Boston. Stories of women skating in Boston, and advertisements from Boston firms selling Ladies’ Skates began trickling into Vermont, often accompanied by teasing editorial responses.

In March 1858, Skating Fever, as it was termed by some newspapers, finally hit Vermont when a group of women in Montpelier formed a beginner ice skating class. (The editor of the St. Johnsbury Caledonian gleefully offered his thoughts on what that said about the morals of the women in Montpelier.)

By the winters of 1858 and 1859, Vermont was for skaters. Vergennes maintained a rink on Otter Creek, where skating parties and clubs became a regular occurrence. Demand for ice skates was higher than ever, with stores prominently advertising the number of the ladies’ skates they had in stock and marking the appearance of skating-specific clothing. Romanticized historical stories of Vermont began incorporating ice skating into the biographies of the earliest Europeans in Vermont, cementing its place in our collective identity.

There were mixed reactions to this change. Newspaper commentators delighted in the healthy exercise and socializing it brought, often writing about the charm of watching a poised person falter their first time on the ice and how skating brought young and old together. Many of the papers who initially wrote against the idea of women skating quickly changed their point of view as it became clear that it wasn’t just a passing fad. After all, as printed by The Middlebury Register, The Vermont Watchman and State Journal, and The Vermont Patriot and State Gazette, at least the women who were skating weren’t “gorging themselves with literary poison."

This article originally appeared in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of our member magazine, History Connections. To get it and support the Vermont Historical Society, sign up as a member.