World's Oldest Hockey Stick at Mount A

Mount Allison scientists are excited about looking at what appears to be the world's oldest known hockey stick.

Scientists are preparing to conduct tests on the age of the artifact that could be critical to the game's history - a hand-hewn, maple-root specimen from Cape Breton that historians of Canada's favourite sport are endorsing as the most genuine candidate yet to be considered a "national treasure."

While other contenders have recently been offered for sale on eBay, experts say the object owned by Nova Scotia youth worker Mark Presley has the composition, design and provenance of an authentic, early 19th-century shinny stick - a relic from the era when hockey was evolving from a variety of stick-and-ball skating games throughout Eastern Canada.

Presley, who was in Campbellton, N.B., on Saturday to give the stick its first national exposure during a nation-wide CBC broadcast for Hockey Day in Canada, told Canwest News Service the stick was being sent this week to dendrochronologists - tree-age specialists - at Mount Allison for analysis aimed at confirming other tests and research indicating an origin in the 1830s or earlier.

Experts from the Toronto-based Society for International Hockey Research (SIHR) examined Presley's stick last fall and declared it the best example yet of a mid-1800s hockey stick.

Presley, a 41-year-old history buff from Berwick, N.S., acquired the stick last March after it had been displayed for about 30 years on the wall of a barbershop in North Sydney, N.S.

He carefully traced the stick's origins to the Moffatt family, which had a homestead on the shores of nearby Pottle's Lake. Oral and written records describing shinny contests on the lake in the mid-1800s - with Moffatt family members among the skaters - have strengthened the case for the stick's authenticity.

Particularly intriguing are the initials "W.M" etched into the blade of the stick, suggesting the metre-long object was carved in the 1830s for a family ancestor named W.M. (Dilly) Moffatt, born in 1829.

But Presley's research has also identified other "W.M." candidates from the family tree going back as far as the late 1700s.

Read more:
NS shinny stick could be a national treasure
(Nanaimo Daily News)