A canoe with serial number 554777 or 554117 might be an Old Town. They stopped keeping paper records with number 533392 so there is no easy way to confirm this. Can you provide any pictures of the canoe and the numbers from each end?
The Old Town canoe with serial number 129584 is an 18 foot long Guide model with open spruce gunwales and a keel. It was built between March and July, 1940. The original exterior paint design was similar to the one shown at
http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/designs/design47.gif which was known as their design number 47. It shipped on July 9th, 1940 to Mankato, Minnesota. The back side of the card indicates that there was a previous request for this information in October, 1982 from Northfield, Minnesota.
Scans showing both sides of this build record can be found below. These scans and several hundred thousand more were created with substantial grants from the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) and others as you probably know well. A description of the project to preserve these records is available at
http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/records/ if you want more details. I hope that you will donate, join or renew your membership to the WCHA so that services like this can continue. See
https://www.woodencanoe.org/about to learn more about the WCHA and
https://www.woodencanoe.org/shop to donate or renew.
It is possible that you could have another number or manufacturer if this description doesn't match the canoe. Please post some pictures if the original design is still showing. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions.
Benson
