Hamilton's Surprising Connection to Early Online Gaming
From the team at Whitehern Historic House & Garden
Gaming culture is alive and well in Hamilton today. On any given night, you’ll find enthusiastic players at gaming cafes along James Street and in Hamilton Public Library branches. Shops abound in this city with role playing adventure games, escape rooms, arcade revivals, board game venues, and group video game-playing events to entertain almost everyone.
So what does a random woman sitting in the middle of a McQuesten family photograph from 1903 have to do with today’s gaming culture in this city?
Whitehern Historic House & Garden is one of the City of Hamilton’s Civic Museums. It belonged to the McQuesten family, who for three generations from 1851-1968 were the only family to live in this ‘oasis’ behind City Hall. Thousands of artifacts, including the family’s correspondence, furnishings, and knickknacks belonging to the family were included in the home when it was handed over the City to become a museum, which opened in 1972. Among the artifacts are the family’s photographs, which museum staff refer to in their ongoing research of the family and in public programming.
Whitehern today. City of Hamilton.
McQueston family photograph, 1903. Miss Mewburn is pictured in the centre with bow tie. City of Hamilton.
Detail of a McQueston family photograph, 1903. City of Hamilton
Most of the photographs in the collection are strictly of immediate family, including the one pictured here. The photograph includes members of the McQuesten family sitting on the front steps of their densely vine-covered house including, from left to right, Ruby, Uncle Calvin, Thomas, Hilda, Mary Baldwin, Margaret Edna and Mrs. Mary Baker McQuesten, the matriarch, seated in a wicker rocking chair. In the middle of this bucolic scene sits a mystery woman. Who is the random lady in the middle of this McQuesten family photograph? That’s what historical interpreter Sonya de Laat asked herself as she researched the Whitehern Historic House & Garden’s photography collection. The woman was identified only as Miss Mewburn.
As it turns out, this young woman with the pompadour hair and oversized bowtie is the granddaughter of one of Hamilton’s first online gamers. No, not online as in the internet, but over the telephone. It was in August of 1877 that Miss Mewburn’s grandfather, T.C. Mewburn, participated in a remote chess game with his friends C.D. Cory and Hugh Cossart Baker Jr. Baker had started the first commercial telephone company in Canada two years earlier using telegraph technology stung between the friends’ homes. In 1877, after having learned of Alexander Graham Bell’s invention at the Philadelphia International Exhibition, the line was upgraded to telephone so the chess enthusiasts could discuss chess moves and play remotely. Baker would go on to start up the first commercial telephone company in Canada that year, and the first telephone exchange in the British Empire in 1878.
A plaque at 8 Main Street East, Hamilton, Ontario. City of Hamilton.
A short distance from Whitehern, on the corner of Main and McNab streets (8 Main Street East to be precise) can be found a plaque marking the spot where Cossart established the first telephone exchange in Canada.
While gaming historians continue to debate the origins of online gaming, with most considering the ARPANET and MUDs of the 1970s-1980s to be more recognizable predecessors of today’s versions, an argument can be made that it actually originated 100 years earlier right here in Hamilton with a grandfather of one of the McQuesten family’s friends.
Telephones have certainly changed since the McQuesten family lived at Whitehern. Come visit the museum to see if you can identify what old telephones looked like. While there, you can also explore other items and technologies going back to the 1850s that the family used for entertainment and communication. It’s now your turn to share your stories of different technologies you used (or continue to use) to play games with friends near and far.
Sources
Houghton, Margaret (2003). The Hamiltonians, 100 Fascinating Lives. James Lorimer & Company Ltd., Publishers Toronto. p. 6. ISBN 1-55028-804-0.
The Hamilton Spectator (2016). June 20, 1877: First telephone exchange opens in Hamilton. September 23. June 20, 1877: First telephone exchange opens in Hamilton | TheSpec.com
The Eldest Child of George W. Baker & Ann Cole: Hugh Cossart Baker Hugh Cossart Baker
