Earlier this year, we were fascinated with the story of “the oldest hockey stick from the 1850’s” being sold for $2.2 million on e-Bay.  Here’s another claim of a stick dating to the early 1800’s. 

     “The dendrochronological data fit well with the archival details suggesting the stick was originally made for W.M. ‘Dilly’ Moffatt sometime in the 1830s. This would suggest that this is the oldest ‘hockey’ stick known to exist in Canada.”

     A team of Laroque’s researchers from the Mount Allison dendrochronology lab spent a week searching through woodlots near Pottle Lake for trees old enough to compare their growth rings from the early 1800s with the 43-year record of rings preserved in the Moffatt Stick.

     “We were initially worried that we wouldn’t be able to find a tree 200 years old, because in this area forestry has been going on for 400 years,” said Laroque, who will also present the findings at a national conference of geographers in June. “Most trees you see in Atlantic Canada are 100 years at best.”

     But just a short distance from Pottle Lake, they found four sugar maples old enough to have been living during those telltale decades, Laroque said.

Read the whole of the story here.

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