Canada Museum Acquires World's Oldest Ice Hockey Stick

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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.

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