The Oldest Hockey Stick is Sold!

By Rochelle Bergman

Most items today do not last long. You use them for a short period of time and then they break or they are out dated. But, there are some things that enhance with age. They shine better, glide faster and make goals just a bit easier. It’s hard to explain a well used piece of equipment but you know when you have one.

Take the oldest known hockey stick on earth. It was sold to a museum recently for the awesome sum of $300,000 on the East Coast of Canada.

Picture a boy, William Moffatt, who was born around 1829 picking up his new stick. He would have been younger than 10 years old when someone took a single tree branch and shaped it into a one-of-a-kind hockey stick. It was in the early 19th Century when William actually carved his initials on the blade.

In 2008, Mark Presley found the stick in a shop and paid $1,000 for it. The Moffatt family kept the stick in their barber shop from the time when it was used no more to when Presley saw it. It was made for Presley to see the stick and buy it. It was made in hockey heaven! The museum that paid for it was not the Hockey Hall of Fame. It was a local museum that bought the stick and it will end up in the Canadian Museum of Civilization. So that’s how you get in, just be over 200 years old and still look good! When Presley started to research the hockey stick he found that it was made near Cape Breton in Canada on the East Coast. He met with William Moffatt’s 92-year-old grandson. He told Presley tales about his granddad playing hockey on a few frozen local ponds.

In 2001, another hockey stick was put on eBay. It was an Alexander Rutherford Hockey Stick made in 1852. It sold for the grand price of $2.2 million.

I bet there are a few hockey sticks lying around in people’s basements or backyards. With a little spit and shine, these timeless pieces can lie in a place of honor or be used in the game they were designed to play.