Eye on History

By Glen Hancock

If the National Hockey League can extend its finales into June, I may be excused if I make some unseasonal comments about the days when bobsledding was king of winter sports in the Valley.

The Jodrey boys of Gaspereau have discovered a 100-year-old bobsled, which for 50 years has been forgotten and wasting away in the Arnold Cold horse barn on the road to Melanson. Rod Fairn has restored the snow vehicle in his shop at Grand-Pre, and it is soon to be on display at the Gaspereau Winery.

Bobsledding is no longer a sport on crisp winter hillsides, having become too dangerous when automobiles took over the roads, but there are still some who remember the thrill of winter capers on fast-moving runners. In fact, there are still a few oldsters who remember coasting on the rare 10-seater bobsled now preserved for posterity. It has an interesting story.

Martin Gabrielson, who lived in the area of Norwegian Bend on the road to Gaspereau mountain, built the bobsled in 1906. Martin’s father, a seafaring Norwegian, befriended a Gaspereau native, Ed Schofield, also a sailor, and visited the Valley about which Schofield was always boasting. Captain Gabrielson’s family lived in Gaspereau for a time, but eventually left for the Boston States, leaving the Norwegian name for one of the sharpest bends on the Gaspereau mountain.

Martin married Alice, a daughter of Cyrus and Bessie Davidson, and they lived at the John Atwell place. He was one of the founders of the Baptist church at Forest Hill. Like so many other Nova Scotians at that time they moved to the U.S.A.

Sleighs, sleds, sledges and toboggans were early modes of transportation in Canada, but the bobsled was mainly a recreational vehicle. It originated in Switzerland about 1890 and was originally a toboggan with runners. The sport challenged skiing and a separate bob-run was built at St. Moritz as early as 1904.

In 1923, bobsledding became an international sport and was included in the first winter Olympic games of 1924. The Olympics use the French word “luge” to describe the bobsled, which is usually manned by one of two persons, but sometimes as many as four.

Curiously, the word bobsled came from the practice of bobbing from side to side, which was supposed to increase speed. In the Olympic luge contests the chute is lined with artificial ice, allowing speeds in excess of 60 miles an hour.

It is not likely that Martin Gabrielson’s 10-seater -- plus the driver, who operated the front sled fixed to the vertical axle by turning a wheel attached to ropes -- ever reached that kind of speed, but it was doubtless the fastest vehicle around as it sped down Gaspereau mountain, around Norwegian Bend, and down, perhaps, to Gaspereau River. Bobsleds raced down slighter slopes throughout the Valley in the ‘20s and early ‘30s.

Bobsleds were made mostly of wood, the four runners mounted in pairs on two axles – two pairs of runners in tandem. As a relic of a bygone era, the Gabrielson vehicle will be an attraction to many as it is displayed at the Gaspereau Winery this summer, but not more so than for Gaspereau resident Marilyn Morine, a granddaughter of Martin Gabrielson, and for Nell Coldwell, one of the Valley’s oldest women, and for 94-year-old Randolph Gertridge, all of whom rode the Gabrielson bobsled when they were young.