Every small town has its secrets.

The best one in St. Stephen, N.B., was in an old brick building downtown, just steps from the American border. A local charity, the St. Croix Vocational Centre, owned the building in 2010 and was using it as a thrift shop when a fire revealed what it hid.

Volunteer firefighters quickly extinguished the blaze, although investigators never determined its cause. Local theories include a carelessly discarded cigarette butt or arsonous teenagers. Regardless, it proved a boon: during the cleanup, workers pulled up damaged carpet in a second-floor storeroom and discovered beautiful, old-fashioned hardwood.

Historians say that the site had been an army enlistment centre, a YMCA, a dance hall, even the province’s first drugstore. And people started wondering: could this discovery hearken back to that Victorian-era YMCA?

Could this be a basketball court dating back to the sport’s infancy? St. Stephen has long been known as a hoops town, with school teams holding their own against big-city foes. The sport came here in the 1890s, almost immediately after James Naismith nailed his peach basket to the wall of a Massachusetts YMCA. (You may recall the Heritage Minute that was once ubiquitous on Canadian television).

“I was a councillor when we had that fire,” recalls St. Stephen Mayor Allan MacEachern. “They told us they found this floor, shared with us that we’ve had this hidden in our town. It made the hair stand up on my arms.”

Retired businessman Richard Fulton felt a tingle too, which is why he helped found the non-profit Canada First Basketball. The group came into existence not long after the fire and mysterious discovery, although he takes a longer view.

“Our project really started in 1891 with the invention of basketball by James Naismith,” he says. “He intended to keep young men fit and engaged in winter. He taught the game to 18 students and sent them to YMCAs around the world to teach it to others.” One of them was Lyman Archibald, the new director of the St. Stephen YMCA.

Which takes us back to the building in St. Stephen. A search of the Saint Croix Courier newspaper archives revealed that by Oct. 17, 1893 the then-YMCA did indeed have a basketball court, as it hosted an international basketball game, with the local men playing a squad from across the river in Calais, Maine.

“We’re not claiming that was the first game,” says Fulton. “There were earlier games played on other courts. But those courts all disappeared over the years. This building came after the Great Fire in 1877. It began with fire. And the rediscovery was also in fire — the oldest existing indoor basketball court in the world.”

Right now, it’s a boring, empty room with bile-green walls and a spectacular floor. Fulton and other community members driving the project see a space jammed with potential, and are working to turn it into part of the new Canadian National Basketball Experience Museum, with exhibitions, events, and artifacts. Organizers recently announced that renowned American architect Timothy Mansfield has joined the project.

Mayor MacEachern recalls the first challenge was one of the biggest. “The building was owned privately,” he says. “That all had to be worked out. The St. Croix Vocational Centre was using the building for another need. We had to work with them to find an alternative, had to work with the committee to gain ownership. It was a long process.”

And that was just the start of the job. “It will mean a great deal,” MacEachern explains, adding that the challenge for a border town is to get visitors to stop for a while, rather than just passing through. “We’re a gateway from the U.S. It will be a drawing card, bring more traffic. It’s a weird feeling to hear what happened here. I never knew that was here. Just blew me away. We have a huge responsibility now that we know what we have. You can’t just let it go and do nothing. It has to be protected and shared with the world. It’s a really big deal.”

Fulton agrees. “We’re trying to put together the whole story of what happened in building,” he says. “YMCA was a short resident, here for about five years. We want to present that story beyond the history of basketball.

“We’re doing lots of studies to figure out how this can be. How do we take all the ideas and facility and develop it into an experience?”

It’s the kind of work that happens quietly, behind the scenes, so if you’re walking past the building’s weathered brick façade, you’d have little clue what’s afoot, but they hope to welcome visitors in three to five years.

If that seems far off, consider how far they’ve come. Volunteers raised money from local businesspeople to buy the building, a mammoth effort in a small town, completed in the midst of the COVID pandemic. “Reaching the $1 million mark … is a testament to the hard-working individuals, the community,” fundraising committee chair Carol Kelly told the Courier in 2022. “It’s refreshing that with this small group of St. Stephen volunteers, we have a documented, planned strategy for the building.”

That funding work isn’t done, though. “All this takes money,” Fulton says. “We’ve been hand to mouth. You can’t ask people to support something until you understand what it can be. We’re excited about this project, but we need to convince people of its potential and business value — government and private supporters.”

He’s determined to see it through to the final buzzer. “I’m retired, so I have nothing else to do,” he laughs. “I’ve lived in the community for 30-some years … and worked on a number of economic development projects. This is a one-of-a-kind project that we knew we needed to develop for the best interests of the community.

Fulton doesn’t think it’s a complicated pitch: “People will come from all over,” he says. “It can be a springboard for other attractions. We’re planning on partnering on programs that will encourage physical fitness and wellbeing. Imagine our ability to bring in an NBA player and have training camps. We’ve had a lot of those conversations. Canada Basketball is on board. We had a team go to Springfield College (where Naismith invented the sport) and go through their facility.”

The work isn’t just about sports, or even about tourism and economic development. It’s about a small Atlantic town preserving its history, and rediscovering something that makes it special.

Fulton sums up: “There can only be one oldest, and we have it.” 

WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS
If you’re a francophile or student of international-basketball history, you may be yelling “Arrêt! What about Paris!?” A YMCA in France’s capital has long claimed to be home to the oldest surviving basketball court, hosting its first game in December 1893.

“The YMCA in Paris was the game’s very first landing spot in Europe — a slice of American life transplanted to France,” reported the New York Times in 2017. “When the building was completed, an American named Melvin B. Rideout became its first athletic director, bringing basketball with him to Paris and practising in what was essentially a contemporary replica of the Springfield (Massachusetts) gym where the game was created.”

The Saint Croix Courier newspaper archives verify that St. Stephen, N.B., hosted its first game weeks before the one in Paris, so the French site will have to content itself with amending its claim to being the “oldest surviving, continuously used basketball court.”

Richard Fulton and the St. Stephen team are diplomatically salving feelings. “We’ve been reaching out to Paris folks to work together so it won’t be a competition,” he says. “We want to promote the same thing. We all feel huge responsibility to preserve history and accurately tell the real story.”

Editor's Note: Saltscapes originally published this story in December 2023. Since then, the project has advanced considerably. Click here for the latest updates from the organizers.