Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium

With a research trip to Cambridge on the agenda for next week, I thought I’d look into the possibility of visiting the site of Constance Applebee’s first demonstration of field hockey in the United States. The consensus of all the accounts I have read is that the demonstration took place in a courtyard behind the Hemenway gymnasium at Harvard university in the summer of 1901.

A quick look at a current Harvard campus map revealed the good news: there is still a building called the Hemenway Gymnasium in the north yard of the Harvard campus. A quick click on the “details” tab of the map revealed the bad news: it was built in 1940. Continue reading “Harvard’s Hemenway Gymnasium” →

Filling In a Minor Detail

In the absence of any living witnesses to Constance Applebee’s introduction of field hockey to the United States in 1901, I find myself compulsively searching for as many contemporary accounts as I can possibly find. Sometimes I’m looking for specific facts, but other times I’m just blindly fishing in the hope that I’ll come across something I didn’t know before.

Continue reading “Filling In a Minor Detail” →