Abstract

This article outlines and interprets the broad contours of the ways in which the small towns of Ingersoll and Woodstock Ontario conducetd their 24 May Queen's Birthday and 1 July Dominion Day holidays between 1850 and 1900. It begins with a comparative analysis of the social and sporting roots of the two towns. It then illustrates the nature of civic holidays before Canada's Confederation (1867) and identifies the traditional sports events that occurred during them. It shows how during the Post-Confederation era middle-class sports organizers began to use the holiday venue to create selective sports traditions to promote and express respectability in booster fashion. Throughout the amateur movement they struggled to monopolize the forms and meanings that sport was to take. Organized amateur sport thus became a forum for struggles over the establishment of a cultural supremacy. By the late 1880s town councils sanctioned the creation of local Amateur Athletic Associations (AAA), which were tapped into a emerging national regulatory network for sport, to administer the annual holidays and to regulate local sport on an ongoing basis. Eaton