Walking up a dusty path towards Fort York in 1935, a 10-year-old school girl noticed a pinkish-white, pointy object, a little larger than a quarter, lying in the sand.

Jeanne Carter picked it up, put it in her pocket and held on to it for 80 years before turning it over to city historians.

“I thought it was an arrowhead or something, but nothing more than a souvenir,” said Carter, now 92.

A few weeks ago she learned it is not only an arrowhead, but also between 4,000 and 6,000 years old, originating from some of the region’s first Indigenous people from the Archaic period (8,000 to 1,000 BC).

“I nearly fainted,” Carter said of when she heard the news.

The arrowhead, almost perfectly preserved, is now quite possibly the oldest artifact in the city’s collection, and rare, said a city historian.

“The material it’s made out of, quartzite, is strange for this part of Ontario,” Richard Gerrard, a historian with Museum and Heritage Services and a trained archeologist. “And finding anything that old sitting on the ground is special and has a wonderful story.”

The arrowhead, with slightly rippled, sharpened edges, would have been attached to a wooden shaft and used for hunting, but because of its age, it’s impossible to know what tribe would have used it, or any other details, said Gerrard.

It’s one of four arrowheads in the city’s collection from Fort York, but the only one that’s been discovered by a member of the public, not an archeologist, Gerrard said. Around the time Carter found the arrowhead, Fort York was transitioning from a military site to a public museum and the city likely dug it up accidentally when it was installing a sewer line or water pipe.

The arrowhead could’ve been moved around as the city graded the grounds and laid sod, until it finally ended up at the feet of a young Carter who thought, “oh wonderful.”

She put the arrowhead in her mother’s foot-long mahogany box and, when she grew up, put the box on her living room coffee table. Over the years she added other treasures to the box — a pair of small golden scissors shaped like a bird, a glass ornament of some kind, a spoon from India.

From time to time her three children peeked inside and held the objects in their hands. “The arrowhead was always there,” said Carter’s daughter Terry.

Meanwhile, Carter was delving deep into history as a volunteer at the Royal Ontario Museum. In 1957 she and 35 others founded a ROM volunteer committee and led tours all over the world, including China. Sixty years later, Carter is the ROM’s longest-serving volunteer.

One day, about two years ago, Carter opened the mahogany box, picked up the arrowhead and once again put it in her pocket. She brought it to a friend who works at a city museum. Nothing spurred Carter to part with the arrowhead, other than she thought her friend would like it, she said.

“I never dreamed it was important to Toronto or Ontario,” Carter said.

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Her friend passed it along to an archeologist who eventually gave it to Gerrard who had it analyzed.

The arrowhead is now among the more than 1 million historical objects and archeological artifacts held by the city. The vast majority are in storage, while some are on display at the city’s 10 site museums, like Fort York.

Many of the city’s artifacts were found in archeological digs at historic sites or development projects throughout Toronto, and will be held and preserved indefinitely.

“Material recovered archeologically tells the city’s story and reflects the First Nations presence over thousands of years,” said Wayne Reeves, the chief curator of Museums and Heritage Services for the City of Toronto. “No paper record was left by those early inhabitants, so knowing their story through archeological specimens is essential.”

The arrowhead will be put on display at Fort York, likely this summer, and Carter plans to go see it.