CAMBRIDGE — At first glance, the Hespeler-brand Vel-Pro looks like any other old wooden hockey stick.

But then Lary Turner takes the Cambridge-made stick off the wall and shows you the blade.

Wrapped around the curved wood is a long strip of black Velcro — the reason this oddity was banned from use by most leagues before it ever saw the light of day. That makes the Vel-Pro an illegal, incredibly rare hockey stick.

"They claimed it would turn the average hockey player into a stickhandling specialist," said Turner, the amateur historian and archivist who runs the Hespeler Heritage Centre, created by a group called The Company of Neighbours.

The stick, one of the many local treasures inside the mini-museum, is believed to have been made sometime in the 1970s as a prototype. It was never mass produced.

The hockey stick was donated to the collection by a former manager from the now-defunct Hespeler-St. Mary's Wood Specialties Ltd., which was once the oldest hockey stick maker in the world.

You've probably haven't heard of the Vel-Pro because the powers that be worried it would upset the balance of skill in hockey leagues everywhere. Its makers patented the technology and claimed its clingy blade would grip a puck like no ordinary tape.

"They had to have it approved for use. But when they applied to most of the leagues, they worried it would even up the skill of the players, so they ruled it illegal before it ever went into production," Turner said.

Turner and the volunteers who run The Company of Neighbours have spent years building up their archive of Hespeler history. They visit estate sales, browse online and sift through donated artifacts to find items like the Vel-Pro that tell the history of Hespeler, the independent-minded mill town swallowed up by amalgamation in 1973.

"We're running out of space to put the stuff," said Turner, a retired postal worker.

Like the Vel-Pro, there are piles of artifacts displayed here that were made by long-gone Hespeler companies. There are end tables by the Hespeler Furniture Co., roasting pans from Stamped & Enameled Ware Ltd., and a washing machine by W.A. Kribs Co.

At one time, Hespeler was one of biggest brands in professional hockey, and its sticks were used by everyone from Bobby Hull to Wayne Gretzky. The brand was later bought by Gretzky and a Minneapolis company, and is no longer made in Cambridge.

At the entrance to the archives in the old town hall, there's a giant Hespeler road sign. It was removed from its perch on the eve of amalgamation, and stored in a municipal staffer's basement for decades.

There are hundreds of photos on display, too. They range from kindergarten choirs and beauty contestants to demolished schools and the town's former postmaster, who trained Tommy Burns, the Hespeler-raised boxer who became Canada's first world heavyweight champ in 1906.

To help fill in some of the blanks with the items he displays, Turner relies on longtime residents like Sam Inglis, 86, who played defence for the Hespeler Shamrocks in the late 1940s.

Inglis and other volunteers here are part of a living memory of a Hespeler many of us have never seen, and is at risk of fading.

"There's only two people left in that picture who are still alive," said Inglis, pointing at the team photo of the Shamrocks from 1947. "There aren't many around anymore who still remember this stuff."

Photos of the long-gone Hespeler police service, and all five of its officers, are just around the corner, above the chief's desk. A working gramophone is a few feet away. Baseball bats and wooden paddles, all made by Hespeler-St. Mary's Wood Specialties, are hung nearby.

There are company photos from Dominion Woolens, once the largest mill of its kind in the British Empire — which employed a third of all adults in town at its peak. In the main lobby, there's three regal-looking wooden chairs, all circa 1896 and plucked from the local Oddfellows Hall that folded in 2005.

"There are thousands of stories in here," Turner said.

The Company of Neighbours was started by a group of residents in 1992. With the help of Kenneth Banks from Wilfrid Laurier University, it expanded into a storefront collection, and eventually into the old town hall.

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Today, the public archive runs on a shoestring budget, thanks to donations and revenues from a small coffee shop. Turner has ambitions it could be expanded into a museum to cover all of Cambridge, but it needs more room.

For now, its work to preserve Hespeler's past is more important than ever, Turner said. The community's population has tripled since the group began — bringing thousands of newcomers who've yet to know the town's story.

"I see this as a community resource. There's a whole lot of people living here now who have very little knowledge of the place they're living in," he said.