Very soon after beginning my research I came across several versions of the same basic story regarding field hockey’s arrival in the United States. It seems that the sport was quite popular among men and women in England during the late 19th Century, but it wasn’t played at all in the United States until an English woman named Constance Applebee arrived in 1901. Applebee attended the summer session in physical training at Harvard that year, and staged a field hockey demonstration for her fellow students in a courtyard outside the Hemenway Gymnasium. That fall she was invited to six of the Seven Sisters colleges to teach field hockey, at which time it took off as a women’s college sport.
Sounds great. But a story of that age could potentially have picked up some inaccuracies over the years, so I thought it would be a good idea to verify as many of the details as I could from contemporary accounts. And, through the magic of the internet, I was able to do most of it from home.
Firstly, I was able to verify that a Constance Mary Katherine Applebee was on the roster of students
for the summer session at Harvard that year through the Cambridge Tribune:
The Tribune had her listed as being from Boston, but in the Harvard University Catalog from 1901, she was listed as being from England:
Having placed Applebee at Harvard in the summer, I went looking for evidence of her tour that fall. The earliest reference I found was of a visit to Wellesley in early October:
After that she seems to have gone to Vassar:
Later in October she visited Bryn Mawr:
And went back to Cambridge to coach at Radcliffe:
Applebee visited Wellesley again:
And sometime that fall she was at Smith:
So far, though it has often been mentioned as one of the colleges she visited that fall,
I have been unable to come up with proof of a visit to Mount Holyoke. And the
idea that field hockey was not played at all in the U.S up to that point turns out to be a
slight exaggeration, but that’s a topic for another time.
The bones of the story checked out, which was satisfying. But there’s a lot of meat yet to come.
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