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When he bought an ancient stick with a curved blade for $1,000 in 2008 from a barber in North Sydney, N.S., Mark Presley had no idea he’d acquired the world’s oldest hockey stick.

He wasn’t even certain the object was a hockey stick. “But it was interesting and it was different,” Presley said Friday at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. “It really was almost a curiosity. I didn’t expect much beyond that.”

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The museum announced Friday it had acquired the ‘Moffatt stick’ from Presley for $300,000. Research has established that a member of the Moffatt family handcrafted it from a single piece of sugar maple between 1835 and 1838 in Cape Breton.

“Hockey is Canada’s game,” said Mark O’Neill, the museum’s president and CEO. “We developed it and we cherish it like no other country in the world. The Moffatt stick is a unique and powerful link to the sport’s earliest days in this country.”

Presley brought the short-handled, long-bladed stick to Ottawa Thursday in a long silver case and handed it over to museum officials. It will go on display in the museum’s new history hall when it opens to the public on July 1, 2017.