Art Federow keeps the old hockey stick leaned up against the wall in his living room. He cherishes the thing, from the butt of its wooden body to the fraying blade that’s chipped and cracked with the damage of time.

“I look at it every day,” says the 56-year-old who raises cattle and pigs and lives in Niagara Falls.

“I bring it out when the boys come around and have a few beers and say, ‘Check this out, boys.’ . . . We have fun with it while we watch the Leafs lose.”

But what’s so special about the dried out old piece of wood? Well, based on his own gut and some local lore about the national game, Federow suspects his hockey stick might be one of the oldest in existence — at least as old as the one the Canadian Museum of History bought this month for $300,000.

“I don’t know how that (age) testing works. I don’t know how they tell a rock is a million years old,” Federow says. “When you look at that stick and you look at my stick, they’re very similar.”

Federow is comparing his stick to that of Nova Scotia’s Mark Presley, who bought his old hunk of lumber from a local barber in 2008. Based on a wood analysis at Mount Allison University — which found the sugar maple of the hockey stick was harvested in the mid-1830s — the Canadian Museum of History deemed it the “oldest hockey stick known to exist” and bought it from Presley for $300,000, using funds from a voluntary donation program, according to a Jan. 9 news release.

When Federow caught wind of that, and saw a photo of Presley’s stick in the Star, he thought his looked similarly antique. “I’m thinking it’s at least as old as that one, if not older,” he said Monday.

In the wake of the history museum’s stick purchase, calls have been flooding in to the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto, from people claiming to have equally historic sticks.

According to the history museum, the Nova Scotia stick’s status derives from stories passed down by its previous owners, the Moffatt family of Cape Breton, which traces the stick back several generations.

But Federow has his own stick story.

As a little boy in the 1960s, he was rummaging around the attic of his grandfather’s house. “I was crawling around up there, and I moved a pile of newspapers,” and there was the stick, next to a pair of primitive-looking skates, he said.

He didn’t think much of it until 2008, when he read an article in the local paper about two Swedish historians who found a passage in an old book that possibly tied the origins of the sport to the Niagara region. Written by a British soldier who’d spent time in the area in the early 19th century, the book includes a description of men skating and playing hockey on Chippawa Creek in 1839.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Federow’s grandfather was a cobbler whose house, where he found the stick and skates, fronts onto Chippawa Creek. “It’s certainly in the ballpark of a hundred-plus years old,” Federow said. “If this stick had any correlation to those soldiers, then that’s going back further.”

Though intrigued by Federow’s story, Brian Logie isn’t holding his breath. The retired schoolteacher is known for his expertise in historic hockey sticks and, since news broke of the Canadian history museum’s big buy, Logie said he’s been approached by many people hoping to appraise old sticks.

“I probably had 50 phone calls and numerous emails, because everyone has a stick in their closet that’s got to be worth all this money.”

That said, when told of Federow’s stick, he said that it’s quite possibly 100 years old, at least. That’s because of the short length of its shaft, a sign that it was used in the early days of the sport, and the metal rivet lodged in the tip of the blade, a signal that it was made after 1900, when such technology was first patented, said Logie.

Even so, Logie said it’s hard to pin down dates of origin for these old sticks, unless, like the $300,000 Nova Scotia stick, it’s strongly associated with a particular producer or person.