Bobs, Bobs, or Bobs? Special that is.

[Benson Gray]

How many canoes did Chestnut build? Who built the most wood and canvas canoes? Is there a chart or graph showing the total of all of the builders?

The short answer is we have no way to know for sure as Dan pointed out. There was a project many years ago to create a database listing all of the WCHA's members' canoes. The chart below shows the distribution of the manufacturers in that collection. If we assume that this is a representative sample of the entire universe of wood and canvas canoes then it offers a chance to make some very rough estimates of the totals for all of the major builders.

Old Town comes out on top with 35% as Dan suggested. The Old Town build records project has provided an estimate that Old Town produced about 134,576 wooden canoes before the 1970s. This indicates that the total population may be around 384,500 wood and canvas canoes from all of the commercial builders and other sources.

The next highest commercial manufacturer was Chestnut with just under 5% of the total. This implies that they may have produced a total of over 17,600 canoes. Peterborough followed with over 3% which is around 12,600 canoes.

The next largest builder with any known serial number records was Morris with 3% of the total. There are some records from Old Town which indicate that the highest Morris serial number may be 17262. This produces an estimate of the total population which is slightly more than the Old Town estimate but in the same order of magnitude.

The 2% for Kennebec and 1% for Carleton are too small to be used for any accurate estimates. Dan Miller produced a spreadsheet of the Kennebec records indicating that they issued 28397 serial numbers. The Old Town records indicate that the highest Carleton serial number issued was 20558.

So there should be plenty of wood canoes around for the few thousand of us who still care about them. Let me know if this doesn't answer your question.

Benson

 

[Dan Lindberg]

Benson ,

What do you think the chances are that the WCHA owner distribution could be biased by the members nationality?

ie, break the distributions down separately for Canadian and US owners, you might find that the distribution is reversed in Canada.

Dan

ie, I see lots of OT's and T's here but very few Chestnuts/Peterborough's, and I've heard it could be just the opposite up in Canada.

 

[Benson Gray]

What do you think the chances are that the WCHA owner distribution could be biased by the members nationality?

There are clearly regional differences in the distribution of canoe manufacturers. There are only 1744 canoes in the old WCHA members' database so this is an exceptionally small population base to be using for a total estimate of nearly half a million canoes. The charts below break it down by country and state/province. The table at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population estimates the population of the world at 7,264,104,680, the U. S. A. at 318,827,000 and Canada at 35,540,419 so the question is how well does this tiny distribution of less than 2000 canoes represent these overall totals? It would be great to have a larger database to use but I don't know of any others that are available.

Benson