Morse Hockey Stick | One of the Earliest Known Hockey Sticks

The offered item, known as the “Morse Hockey Stick,” represents an extraordinary opportunity to own a historic artifact that is very likely contemporary with the nascence of ice hockey in North America. Per extensive testing, including carbon-dating analysis from the University of Georgia and wood identification analysis from the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, as well as expert analysis from the International Society for Hockey Research and the Hockey Hall of Fame, this stick was likely crafted in the late 19th or early 20th century as ice hockey was being codified and its popularity was exploding.

It is among the earliest known hockey sticks ever produced, and the Ice Hockey Hall of Fame has expressed significant interest in displaying it as an important artifact in the history of hockey, while hockey historian J.W. Fitsell has said the stick “fills the void in 19th century hockey history between shinny, ice polo and ice hockey and would be a valuable acquisition for any serious hockey collector or museum curator.” This stick is in many ways a tangible connection between the modern era and games that stretch back to antiquity, a testament to that most human of endeavors that has endured since the dawn of civilization: play.

Games and sport have been a constant of the human experience for millennia. From ancient forms of wrestling and boxing to team games resembling modern day hockey and soccer, travel to any point in time and virtually any place and you will find competitive games formed an important part of life whether as a form of ritual or as a form of leisure or as a form of entertainment for the masses. While sometimes highly organized with official rules, in many cases games developed differently in particular locales and were often shared loosely across time and space informally.

One of the most popular configurations throughout history has been stick and ball games, many of which resembled games we might think of today as “hockey.” From the days of Ancient Egypt, historical records show that games utilizing a driving implement to strike or launch an object toward a standard size goal have developed across historical time and space. 

“Hockey” was a name given in England to a game that shared many commonalities with the games of hurling in Ireland and shinty or shinny in Scotland among others. While the game seemed to be understood well enough across England to be the subject of government and school regulation (“hockey” was subject to a legal ban in the Middle Ages and was the subject of a literary warning about the sport published in 1811), the specific application of the game varied by location such that, as late as 1875, the Blackheath Hockey Club, viewed by many as the oldest hockey club in the world, considered their game to be “so totally at variance with that adopted elsewhere” that they rejected invitations to compete against the East Surrey and Sutton clubs. The first Hockey Association was formed in the U.K. and the first written rules of what became known as field hockey were published in the next year according to the International Hockey Federation.

In colder climes, those with sporting predispositions have channeled the same instinct that inspired the creation of these games to bring them to the ice. The first written description for ice skating in the historical record is from the work of William Fitzstephen in the 12th century, a cleric who worked for Thomas Becket. From there, games resembling hockey on the ice can be seen in works of art, literature, and reporting from works from the Old Dutch Masters to accounts of shinty on the ice in David Calderwood’s The Historie of the Kirk of Scotland from 1646 and further accounts of hurling on the ice in the Dublin Evening Post in 1740. Accounts in modern-day Canada discussed games resembling or even called hockey on the ice played by the Mi'kmaq in the 18th century and by Irish immigrants in Nova Scotia in the early 1800s among others. It was even reported that in 1864, the Prince of Wales partook in a game of hockey on the ice before a “sumptuous luncheon.” There were games called hockey and games called hockey played on the ice that long predated the codification, consolidation, and organization of the 19th century, but they were not the exact games that we think of today and they varied significantly based on locale.

The first game of modern ice hockey recognized by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) took place on March 3, 1875, between two teams of nine skaters from the Victoria Skating Club at the Victoria Skating Rink, based on a set of rules proposed by students at the University of McGill. Modern ice hockey is thought to have drawn especially on the influences of folk games from Europe and North America thanks to the settlement from Europe in North America in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries as well as the First Nations game of lacrosse and a hockeyesque game played by the Mi'kmaq people that had developed for centuries before persistent European contact. 

The 19th century saw a major push for the institutionalization of sport at both the domestic and international level that saw both the codification and invention of many games throughout the U.K., North America, and beyond. Hockey underwent a period of codification in the 19th century, drawing on a multitude of historical examples and organization that yielded the games that we understand and play today. These processes ultimately served to standardize games that were broadly understood across cultural boundaries in a way that allowed them to both be played and understood in a common way. 

The March 3, 1875 Canadian amalgam that became modern ice hockey drew heavily on rugby, lacrosse, and especially field hockey as well as hurling and shinty. The game was well received and several of its original players continued to work on their creation. By February of 1877, McGill University had formed its own hockey club, and shortly thereafter local contests in Montreal between several clubs began featuring in news reports. By the 1880s, the game was identifiable as being the “Montreal Game” or “Montreal style,” and it was ready to be spread beyond the confines of the city. 

November 1883 saw the first known ice-hockey rules published in the United States by the students of St. Paul’s School in New Hampshire. The Montreal Game had clearly made its way stateside, as the preface to St. Paul’s rules makes it clear the boys were aware of the rules drawn up in Montreal. Also that year, the Montreal Winter Carnival took place for the first time and a hockey tournament was featured, trimming each team to seven-a-side, first to accommodate a Quebec City side that could only field seven players but then for the sake of pace and spacing. 

1886 saw the first recognized international contest, when in Burlington, Vermont, two Canadian teams and a local team participated in a three-team tournament at Burlington’s Winter Carnival. Later that year, the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada was formed. 1889 saw ice hockey gain one of its greatest international prophets as Lord Stanley, Earl of Derby and Governor General of Canada from May 1, 1888-September 18, 1893 witnessed his first hockey match at the 1889 Montreal Winter Carnival and donated the trophy for the 1893 Dominion Cup tournament winner in December of 1892, a trophy now known as the Stanley Cup. On returning to Britain, the Stanleys helped to spread the Montreal game there, which in turn helped spread it to Australia, while other Canadian contacts helped spread the game elsewhere. 

By 1910, the Stanley Cup had transferred to the National Hockey Association, a Canadian professional hockey league that would soon blossom into the National Hockey League, or NHL, and expand into the United States. In 1913, the game became a six-a-side contest, which it remains to this day, and by 1920, ice hockey was featured in the Olympics for the first time at the 1920 Antwerp Summer Games. Under the guidance of the International Ice Hockey Federation, formed in 1908 in Switzerland, the contests at the Olympics had come from the Montreal game. That game is now played globally and has been embraced especially by Canada as a national pastime: in 1994, the Canadian government officially declared ice hockey, the game that developed from that game in the earliest days of that country, to be Canada’s national winter sport, with lacrosse remaining the country’s national summer sport. 

Around the same time, another stick and ball game saw its rise and fall: roller and ice polo. The modern roller skate, James Plimpton’s creation, was patented in 1863, and shortly thereafter a wave of roller rinks were erected on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. After the equestrian form of polo was introduced in the United States in 1876 in Newport, the game was reconfigured so that it could be played by those on skates; either roller skates, or ice skates. Similar to hockey, the game utilized sticks to drive an object toward a goal, however unlike in hockey that object was a ball. The sticks were shorter and often wielded in one hand, and perhaps most crucially there was no offside rule in polo where there was in hockey. While initially dominant in the U.S., the game gradually gave way to ice hockey as the winter stick and ball game of choice. 

According to extensive scientific analysis, the strong likelihood is that this stick was made in this late 19th century crucible of winter stick and ball sport development and codification. Scientific testing at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry revealed that the stick was most likely a single piece of wood from either the American Hornbeam (Carpinus caroliniana), a favorite of some of the earliest known major hockey stick makers (perhaps the first in North America), including at a commercial scale, the Mi'kmaq people, or Hophornbeam (Ostrya virginiana) trees, both sharing the common name Ironwood. Both trees have generalized native ranges that include southeastern Canada and much of the northeastern United States. 

Carbon-dating of the stick, performed by the University of Georgia (UGAMS #A20768) gives three main possible date ranges for the wood the stick was made from, the most likely of which (91.4% probability) is 1889-1910. This puts the stick right at the temporal heart of the development of both modern ice hockey and ice polo. Hockey experts seem to concur, as the stick has been reviewed by the Hockey Hall of Fame, Society for International Hockey Research, and preeminent hockey scholar J.W. Fitsell, who expressed that the stick is of major importance in hockey history.

The stick was found by the brother of the current owner when he purchased their grandmother’s home in Northfield, Vermont in 1980. She had lived in the state most of her life, and the home contained many of her possessions accumulated over her lifetime. The stick was found in her closet and offered to the current owner rather than being thrown away.

Their grandfather was a man born in 1884 in St. Alphonse in the province of Quebec, Canada. The family appears to have been in the midst of a move from Quebec province to Vermont at the time, eventually settling more permanently in Vermont. This timeline places the grandfather’s childhood and early adulthood in the heart of ice hockey’s development in and spread from the province of Quebec to the northeastern United States and beyond as well as the development, spread, and eventual decline of ice polo in U.S. mainstream sporting culture as well as the most likely date range of this stick. The current owner and their brother were both born after their grandfather’s passing and were not aware of the stick until 1980. They cannot be certain of the stick’s specific lineage prior to that date. Nevertheless, based on the details of the scientific testing provided, the circumstances of the stick seem to be in keeping with the developments of winter sport in North America and the availability of the requisite wood.

In this stick is the realized passion for sport that would make a global game in the coming decades and centuries. It embodies the extraordinary story of a global culture of stick and ball games converging at a place and time and then spreading back out into the world: history that you can touch and thoroughly imagine. From a folk game played by schoolchildren, First Nations, and the Prince of Wales to a national pastime whose leading scorer in the world’s best league, based in North America, comes from Russia, this stick has borne witness to well over a century of global sporting history. Do not miss the chance for it to tell you its stories.