White House Doll
Wooden skates shod with iron runners were invented in the Low Countries. Dutch children in New Netherlands all skated, just as their grandfathers had in old Batavia. The first skates that William Livingstone had on the frozen Hudson were made of beef bones, as were those of mediæval children. In Massachusetts and Connecticut, skating was among the many Dutch ways and doings practised by English folk in the new world. The Plymouth Pilgrims brought these Dutch customs to the new world through their long and intimate sojourn in Holland; the New Haven and Connecticut Valley settlers learned them through their constant trade and intercourse with their neighbors, the Dutch of Manhattan; but the Massachusetts Bay settlers of Boston and Salem had known these Dutch ways longer,—they brought them from England across seas, from the counties of Essex and Suffolk, where the Dutch had gone years before and married with the English.
Old Tin Toy
New England boys in those early days went skating on thin ice and broke through and were drowned, just as New England boys and girls are to-day, alas! Judge Sewall wrote in his diary on the last day in November, in 1696, that many scholars went to "scate" on Fresh Pond, and that two boys, named Maxwell and Eyre, fell in and were drowned.
