Great that you have this nice old family canoe to restore and provide fun to further generations of the family!
Old Town 81257 is an 18 foot CS grade ("Common Sense") Otca model built between November 1923 and March 1925. It has red Western cedar planking, open spruce gunwales and birch decks, seat frames, and thwarts. It was fitted with a keel and floor rack and painted dark green-- I believe-- the guy has nice handwriting but sometimes the shorthand for dk or lt looks similar. The Otca was shipped to C.S. Richardson in Patten, Maine on April 25, 1925. Is that your grandpa? If this doesn't seem to be your canoe, we can search again.
The scan of this record is attached below. If you'd like a larger copy, email me at
kathrynklos@gmail.com and I'll attach a larger scan to email. Scans of approximately 210,000 records were created with substantial grants from the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) and others. Additional information about the project to preserve these records is available at
http://www.wcha.org/ot_records/ if you want more details.
Please join WCHA or make a tax deductible contribution so that services like this can continue. See
http://www.wcha.org/wcha/ to learn more about the WCHA,
http://www.wcha.org/wcha_video.php to watch a 10 minute video about WCHA and our programs and
http://www.wcha.org/join.php to join. If you are already a WCHA member, THANK YOU!
You can get a lot of support for your canoe restoration project here in Forums... can also find out about great places to paddle.
Welcome to WCHA,
Kathy
