Hockey Stick History

The “Moffatt Stick,” maybe the world’s oldest known hockey stick, was in the news a couple of years ago when its owner, Mark Presley of Berwick, NS, sold it to the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, Quebec for $300,000. Presley came upon the stick during the year 2000 as it hung in George Ferneyhough’s North Sydney barber shop. Fernryhough, who has since retired from the hair-cutting trade, had it on display there for almost 20 years. Carved into the stick’s blade can be found the initials, ‘WM,’ said to be those of its original owner, William Moffatt of the Northside’s Pottle Lake area. In 2008, Presley purchased the artifact from Ferneyhough for $1,000 and then set out to determine its true age. Through a science known as dendrochronology

The Little Bras d’Or school bus driver has in his possession what he calls ‘The Walker Stick’ that bears a strong resemblance to ‘The Moffatt Stick.’ So much so that he is of the opinion that his model could be of the same vintage. Its blade, too, has initials carved into it, ‘DW,’ that likely could stand for, who else, but Donald Walker. “My people landed in Scotch Lake (near George’s River, Cape Breton) about 200 years ago,” said Jessome. “Donald Walker was the original owner of the hockey stick.” According to Jessome, three Walker family members had that name since 1803. One of which would have been his 4th-great

“First, I thought it was a weapon,” he said of the stick that, I should add, is fairly heavy. “But my grandmother told me what it was and that it had belonged to her great-great-great grandfather, or something like that. She had forgotten all about it being there. She told me to keep it, it might be worth something someday.” As a youngster, Jessome played hockey with the stick on the local pond. “I was a goalie and I thought it was a goalie stick,” he said. “I played with it for years.” However, Jessome did something to the stick during the 1970s that, in hindsight, he wishes he hadn’t: He applied varnish to it. “I shouldn’t have done that,” he said, “because I took the stick to the same people in New Brunswick that researched the Moffatt stick and they said that since the varnish was on it, the age of the stick couldn’t be verified. Their microscopes couldn’t see through the varnish, and they didn’t want to drill into it because if the stick turned out to be a national treasure, they’d be on the hot seat for damaging a national treasure.”

Interestingly, Jessome said that one of the New Brunswick researchers told him that not only are both sticks identical in years, Jessome’s is in better