FARMINGTON – A silver commemorative cup missing for more than 20 years was recently found in a Farmington home.

Megan Roberts, former manager of Titcomb Mountain, had been looking for the Girdlers Cup for two years. She put a notice in the Franklin Journal but got no response. She also asked several members if they had seen it, to no avail.

When she put an ad in the Farmington Ski Club newsletter in the spring, member and former ski coach Galen Sayward went to a shelf in his Farmington home and found it tucked in amid about two dozen trophies.

Now the trophy has been returned to the club.

The cup’s disappearance was not a matter of theft or even oversight.

Both of Sayward’s sons had been the last recipients of the cup as the team’s annual Ski Meisters just before the tradition’s ending. Ski Meisters were boys on Farmington Ski Club team who accumulated the most points in interscholastic ski competition. The trophy, awarded each year since 1953, was kept by its recipient for a year, after which it was passed on to the subsequent winner.

Sayward’s boys, Tom and Mike, won the title four years running – Tom in 1978 and 1979 and Mike in 1980 and 1981.

In 1981, ski-jumping, one of four required events for competition, was determined to be too dangerous and was taken out of the program. Only boys were eligible to receive the cup and meister status because, at the time, girls did not ski-jump. The other three events in interscholastic competition were, and remain, slalom, giant slalom and cross country. But the trophy ceased to be awarded.

So the silver cup, with a remarkable and somewhat convoluted history, sat tarnishing for two decades among the artifacts of successful ski careers.

The cup’s history begins in 1952, when it was presented to the Farmington Ski and Outing Club by Dr. and Mrs. Royden Peacock, cousins of Capt. John Abbott Titcomb, the mountain’s namesake. The cup was a replica of a large silver cup created in 1927 to commemorate the 600th anniversary of a 14th century London artisans guild, the Girdlers Company.

In 1953, club trustees decided to honor the club’s Ski Meister competition winner with the cup, which it did until its inadvertent retirement to Sayward’s home.

Now that it has been located, it is unclear what the fate of the cup will be. Most likely it will be put on display at the mountain, Sayward and Roberts say.

“It was in good company (at his home),” said Sayward of the cup. “I think it thought it was going to stay there the rest of its life. I’m sure it’s glad to come home to the ski club,” he said.