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A piece of history from one of Southwestern Ontario’s darkest chapters is going up for sale to the highest bidder.

A 19th-century club that belonged to Robert Donnelly, a member of the infamous family whose five members were massacred by vigilantes near Lucan in 1880, is being auctioned off by Gardner Galleries this summer.

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Robert Donnelly gave the two-foot wooden stick — known as a shillelagh and commonly used as a weapon — to Catherine Currie Corbett, whose husband drove stagecoach for the Irish-rooted clan, according to the London-based auction house.

Londoner Jim Grover, the great-grandson of Currie Corbett, received the shillelagh decades ago and has decided to sell the family treasure, company president Grant Gardner said Tuesday.

We want it up for a few months to spark interest. Online auctions director James Gardner

Grover provided auctioneers with a photo of James Corbett, along with a family obituary and other newspaper clippings, Gardner said.

“With something like this, provenance is everything,” he said.