In the Bloomington Historical Society's early days in the 1960s, George Hopkins was one of the stalwarts. A descendant of a missionary who ministered to the Dakota Indians in the 1840s, Hopkins enthusiastically searched for artifacts for the society collection, especially those linked to Indian culture. He would call his friend and fellow society member Stan Danielson to see what he thought.

"A lot of it was not really worth much," Danielson remembered. "Then he called me and said, 'Stan, I think I found a dugout canoe by the river.'"

Danielson got in his car, picked up his friend and drove down Lyndale Avenue toward the river until Hopkins told him to stop. Sticking out horizontally from the river bank a few feet from the bluff was something that looked like the end of a charred tree stump.

They got out of the car to take a closer look.

"The hollowed-out part just didn't look normal to me," Danielson said. "It looked like a man-made thing.

"I remember saying, 'George, I think you got one.'"

The 16-foot length of cupped and carved tree trunk, dug out of the dirt in 1967, was authenticated by the Minnesota Historical Society as a dugout canoe that dated from around 1600.

For decades it sat in a bed of sand in the basement of Bloomington's Old Town Hall. This fall, the newly cleaned and restored canoe assumed a place of honor among the society's permanent displays upstairs in the renovated Town Hall.

"It is our most precious piece, our oldest antiquity," said Vonda Kelly, the society's president and executive director.

What tribe made the canoe, and what tools they used, isn't totally clear. According to the museum display, Oneota and Dakota Indians made dugout canoes from basswood, cottonwood and maple trees in the Minnesota River Valley for at least 1,000 years. They felled trees by burning the base or cutting them down, then shaped the trunk by splitting the wood lengthwise and alternately chipping away and selectively burning the wood to hollow out the logs.