A Canadian museum has snapped up the world s oldest-known ice hockey stick — made out of maple — for $300,000.
The “Moffatt stick” was hewn in the 1830s in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, “from a single piece of sugar maple,” the Canadian Museum of History said Friday.
“Hockey is Canada s game — we developed it and we cherish it like no other country in the world,” said Mark O Neill, the museum president, who called the stick an example of the facility s “national treasures.”
The stick was owned by one family — the Moffatts — from its creation until the early 1980s, when it was given to a barbershop owner who then sold it in 2008 to the man the museum bought it from.
The museum, located in Ottawa s suburbs, said that genealogical evidence and oral histories, as well as scientific analysis of the stick s “wood, wear and paint,” were used to verify its authenticity.
Hockey-mad Canadians will not be able to see the stick, however, until 2017, when renovations at the museum — Canada s busiest with 1.2 million visitors per year — are completed.