The history of ski jumps

In honor of the Salisbury Winter Sports Association’s (SWSA) Jumpfest, which will be held this year on the weekend of Feb. 6 to 8, the Salisbury town historians shared this remembrance of how ski jumping first came to what is now called Satre Hill in Salisbury: 

Peter Wick in his oral history tells a little about the beginning of SWSA and the ski jumps in February. 

“It so happened that Mr. [Donald] Warner was a judge in Salisbury and a respected person. He was well-off and had a big estate, and had hired a Norwegian to take care of his property. His name was Johann Satre. 

“Judge Warner found out that he had been a ski jumper from Norway. (Johann) built the little ski hill down there and he got people interested in skiing. 

“Ski jumping at that time was like a spectacular sport, where people leaped off 150 feet into the air. It was almost like going to the moon. It was an exciting thing, the ski jump! So Johann had built the ski jump.

“The first thing you know they had a ski meet, and a whole bunch of Norwegian carpenters from New York came up from New York. 

“A lot of publicity came from this skiing in this area. Of course, it took time to grow, which was back in the late 1920s. It kinda grew, little by little, and finally the hill got bigger and bigger. It was one of the first ski hills in New England. There was a lot of publicity generated by this new sport.”

To learn more about ski jumping and SWSA, go to www.jumpfest.org.

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