It came swaddled in a cranberry-coloured towel.
A felling axe with a fawn-foot handle, 50, maybe 100 years old.
Cottager Alexander Pizzey discovered it off a point on Drag Lake during one of his diving excursions and he and his father, Allen, carefully brought it into the Echo office last week.
Could it be a tool used by the loggers who once harvested along the lake’s edges?
Or did it simply fall out of a cottager’s boat as he cruised through the water?
Pizzey might never know.
The family has owned the cottage for about five years and there was no one living on the property before them.
They took the corroded, water-logged tool in to the Haliburton museum Sept. 7 looking for answers, but curator Steve Hill said he couldn’t be certain how old the axe was.
“We’ve never dealt with water-based artifacts,” Hill said.
The best way to date the axe would be to find the manufacturer’s name.
“It’s hard to put a date on a tool that doesn’t change much over the years,” Hill said, explaining the classic design has been used for a long time.
The curator thinks the axe is more than 50 years old and could have been sitting on the lake bottom for much longer.
“I do think it’s a lumbering tool that went through the ice years ago,” he said.