ID 1937 Canoe? Plenty of info.

[Thomas Baker]

Hi! This old canvas canoe is dated for 1937 Augusta, Mi. Could even be 1935-1938, the last number is a bit muddled.
Serial number: 11467
Also, next to the date are the letters BK. Not sure what that could mean.

Can post photos later. Let me know what you think of this case!

 

[ticonderoga]

Looks like a Morris to me from the style of the coming, the closed gunwales and the flag sockets in the King plank. The serial number is similar to most 5 digit numbers in the data bank. A picture of the stem would ID it for sure.

 

[Benson Gray]

Welcome, it will take more than a serial number to identify this canoe so more pictures would be helpful, especially some showing the areas around the serial numbers from each end. It would also be helpful to know the extreme overall length of the canoe in a straight line along with the width. The Old Town canoe with this serial number was 16 feet long and shipped in 1909, the Carleton was 17 feet from 1915, and the Kennebec was a 17 foot long torpedo model from 1917 but none of them looked like the canoe in your pictures. The BK may have been a prior owner's initials. How did you determine that it is from the late 1930s? The scans of these build records can be found by following the links at the attached thumbnail images below. These original Kennebec records are reproduced through the courtesy of the Maine State Museum.



The microfilms and scans of these records along with several hundred thousand more 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 at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/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-wcha to learn more about the WCHA and http://www.wcha.org/store/membership to join.

Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions.

Benson

 

[MGC]

If it is a Morris the stems will confirm it. Morris stems are made of cedar and extremely wide inside the canoe..about 2 1/2 inches .
Morris typically do not have the SN stamped into the stem. The SN is stamped on a brass plate that is riveted to the stem or the inside rail.
If it is a Morris you can roughly date it:
http://wcha.org/content/bn-morris
Morris factory production stopped after a fire in 1919...........