Brooklyn Canoe Club - where did you go?

Ken Cupery

Fan of the 19th Century
I've been wading through newspaper accounts of activities of the Brooklyn Canoe Club in the 1800's and into the 1920's. The fate of this club is related to some other research that I am doing at the moment.

The club was active through the turn of the century but appears to have had its last annual meeting (at least as reported in local newspapers) in 1927. The last newspaper reference lists the club as a creditor in the bankruptcy proceedings of a private banker in 1929. Thereafter reports of the club simply vanish. The club is notably absent in reports of canoe competitions in the 1930's. This was sort of the waning time of recreational canoeing, i think, so the club may have slowly died and disbanded. There are however rumors of a boathouse fire that may have precipitated the demise of the club.

As far as i can determine, none of the canoe clubs in the NYC area are continuations of the old BCC. (As opposed to the New York Canoe Club which was founded in 1870's and which eventually morphed into the North Shore Yacht Club, still operating on Long Island).

In any case, I can find no contemporaneous records detailing the demise and am curious if anyone else might have information?

I have probed most of the sources that I know of or can access. (As a footnote, the ACA is generally useless for this type of information).

I do note some records from the Atlantic Division of the ACA are in the collections of the the Mystic Seaport Library, but am reluctant to make the trek from Rochester for fishing expedition for such a specific tidbit of information.

Any speculations/suggestions welcomed!

I can certainly supply more detail if you're interested.
 
This sort of research is not easy. I have searched for information about the Puritan Canoe Club in Boston after seeing an article at http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/pdf?res=F00710FF355416738DDDA80994D0405B8585F0D3 that mentioned J. R. Robertson represented them at the ACA meeting in 1895. I found that they still have a building on the water in South Boston but nothing else. A similar search for Sail Sleds, Inc. of Rochell Park, N. J. from 1929 to 1933 has not produced much information yet either.

You may want to try the site at http://fultonhistory.com/Fulton.html which has many old New York state newspapers. I just searched there for "Brooklyn Canoe Club" and it found 559 documents although most of them are from well before the 1920s.

The period business directories may provide some information even though canoe clubs were often not technically a businesses. This has helped me identify some early Maine canoe builders as described at http://forums.wcha.org/showthread.php?7166 and Dan Miller has used this technique to gather some great information about the Charles River area builders near Boston.

Old Town produced a racing canoe in the late 1920s and early 1930s that shipped to other New York area canoe clubs but I haven't found any records of them shipping one to the Brooklyn Canoe Club. Please keep us posted here on what you find.

Benson
 
Thanks Benson.

I've already pretty much exhausted the Fulton History site.

It is a truly amazing site! An amazing and productive obsession by the fellow who runs it.

I'll keep you posted if and when I get anywhere on this.


Ken
 
An article about your project in Wooden Canoe might be a great way to find additional information as Paul suggested. I have also found the Sanborn insurance maps helpful as described at http://forums.wcha.org/showthread.php?6860 here. Property often changes hands after a building burns so deed records and tax information can also be useful but this can be more difficult to access remotely. Good luck and let me know if there is anything else that I can do to help. Thanks,

Benson
 
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