Personal Accounts and Memories of the North River Rink

The North River rink was a very popular place, and hockey games were held frequently. Clifford Wilson who now lives in New Dominion, grew up in Cornwall. He remembers playing hockey at the North River rink, but in particular remembers how he got there: “If you were standing on the side of the road with your hockey gear you were automatically picked up.” Clifford also remembers scrapping off the ice in order to play hockey: “I mean, we went to North River and then you scraped the ice so you could play hockey. And then there was no artificial ice back then, there would be holes cut in the boards in the spring to let the water out so you could play hockey because there would be this much ice in the rink because you just kept making it all winter. It was cold like that eh. Then you went to the skates on Friday night. … “Use the hose (to flood the ice), yep. No such thing as a zamboni or nothing like that there. Cause all we had was ice scrapers. And that’s what we scraped it with.”12

Norma Hermann’s family has been living in Cornwall for several generations. She recounts the following story about her father, Arthur Howard. “One of the things I remember my mother talking about was when my Dad first started trucking he would take um, load up the truck with a bunch of people to go to the hockey game, at the rink in North River. And that was quite a common occurrence. He would have the boxed-in truck and people would, they pile into that, go to the hockey game and come back. Probably meet maybe at the store or whatever and just go there, go to North River.”13


Working at the rink
The Honorable Ron MacKinley worked at the North River rink as a young boy. He started out scrapping the ice at age ten, in return he was given free admission to the hockey games as well as hot dog and a bottle of pop. A few years later he was promoted to selling tickets, which gave him a hot dog, a bottle of pop and a dollar at the end of the night, “which meant a lot in those days.”14

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