The campaign to save the world's oldest surviving basketball court recently got a $25,000 boost from former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna and the Toronto Dominion Bank.
     Canada 1st Basketball Inc. President Robert Otto says the money will go towards a $1 million fundraising effort to buy the 19th century brick building on King Street, St. Stephen, where an old newspaper item records that the game was played on October 17, 1893. Local historian Darren McCabe says that was more than two months ahead of a game on December 28, 1893, on an old court still existing in Paris, France.
     Canada 1st Basketball is more than halfway towards raising $1 million and hopes to have the rest by the end of the year, Otto says. This money would go towards buying the building from St. Croix Vocational Centre Inc., stabilizing the structure and engineering and design work for a "basketball experience centre" that could cost $10 million, according to Otto.
     History records that James Naismith from Almonte, Ont., invented basketball while working at the International YMCA Training School in 1891. Players in that first game included Lyman Archibald, originally from Nova Scotia. According to McCabe, Archibald came to St. Stephen as general secretary of the YMCA in September 1893. The Y operated in St. Stephen from 1891 to 1897 in a building on King Street erected following a fire in 1877, McCabe says.
     McCabe says the St. Stephen YMCA changed into the Thistle Athletic Association in 1897. For many years the IOOF used the former upstairs YMCA facilities while commercial tenants, including a drug store, occupied the downstairs.
     More recently, the St. Croix Vocational Centre ran a thrift store from these premises but recently stopped operations at this location.
     Many people knew about the connection to basketball history at this building, but public interest grew after a fire damaged, but did not destroy, the property in 2012. McCabe researched the history, and Canada 1st Basketball was formed. Otto says talks continue on buying the property from St. Croix Vocational Centre, but Jackie Craig with that organization says the group is not ready to say anything publicly.
     Canada 1st Basketball bases its claim that St. Stephen has the oldest floor where basketball was played on a newspaper account of a game played on October 17, 1893. The actual floor on which Archibald taught the athletes to play is still there.
     The floor in Springfield where the very first game was played is gone. Likewise, the floors where games were played in Montreal and Toronto before that game in St. Stephen are gone. "There's only one oldest basketball court in the world," says Otto, who describes himself as an avid fan and former high school coach of basketball.
     He does not know quite what the completed basketball experience centre would look like, except that the world's oldest surviving court would be at the centre of it. Other than raising the first $1 million by the end of the year, there is no timeframe yet for the completed project.