Serial number query.

johnfurey

New Member
I'm a new member. Hello to all ! Looking forward to and excited about being a part of this association. I just started a restoration on an ancient Old Town square stern. It belonged to my wife's grandfather who kept it at Portage Lake in Northern Maine. My wife thinks I need a project and has faith I can do it however it's all new to me. The Old Town was fiber glassed over long ago and is pretty beat. It has many broken ribs and holes. I have stripped off the fiber glass and most layers of dirt and varnish which revealed on the bow stem 97313 16 It also shows up just before the stern brace. It has sponsons and a covered deck area in the bow. There is a drawer under the stern seat. In an old LL Bean catalog I saw a similar boat called the Old Town Lake Boat Canoe. If anyone can shed further light about this boat/canoe, age etc I'd love to hear about it. Thanks
 
Welcome to the WCHA! It's wonderful that you have a family boat to work on. I believe I've found the correct record, but the scan is dark and smudgy and you may want to see if Old Town can give you a cleaner copy, unless one of the other folks who looks them up has a better scan. It's a great record, showing a list of work done on the canoe on the reverse of the card and also a second card-- would be fun to actually be able to read, because it's a record of the repair-history of this canoe (providing this is the correct record). I'll post what I found, which is lodged between 97312 and 97314. It indicates the square stern canoe was completed between January of 1928 and July 1929. Image of the scan of this record is attached below-- click on it to get a larger image.

This scan and several hundred thousand others were created with substantial grants from the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) and others. A description of the project to preserve these records is available athttp://www.wcha.org/ot_records/ if you want more details. I hope that you will join or renew your membership to the WCHA so that services like this can continue. See http://www.wcha.org/about-the-wcha/ to learn more about the WCHA and http://store.wcha.org/WCHA-New-Membership.html to join.

It is also possible that you could have another number or manufacturer if this description doesn't match your canoe. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions.

Kathy
 

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See the link below for better scans of this build record,

Benson


 
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