Morris Ship-Dates

[Benson Gray]

Some more information about the impact of World War One on canoe sales can be found in an article on pages 111 and 112 of the April 11, 1918 issue of "Printers' Ink" as attached below. There is also a chapter in "The Canadian Canoe Company and the Early Peterborough Canoe Factories" by Ken Brown which reviews the impact on the Canadian canoe companies in Peterborough. The short summary is that the war ruined canoe sales and distribution for several years.

Benson

 

[Greg Nolan]

A fascinating article, not just on the impact of WWI on canoe and other commerce, but upon the growing participation of women in the workplace. The article floats the apparently novel idea that it might be worth marketing canoes directly to women, with their increased income.

Compare the 1917 Morris catalogue cover




with that of the 1919 cover.

 

[Benson Gray]

marketing canoes directly to women

This is an angle that Old Town had been working for some time as described in Sue's book and shown on the catalog covers at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/covers/large-05.gif from 1905 and at http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/old-town/covers/large-11.gif from 1911. It clearly became more important during the war.

Benson

 

[MGC]

Another season passed and I am finally getting back to this.

These are the attachments to the Morris Knowledge Base http://forums.wcha.org/knowledgebas...is+Canoe+Company?page=1&do=comments#post53903.
I'll park these here temporarily until I can figure how to show them in the related KB discussion.
Dan just sent me the directions. I'll circle back and try it after I get the roof shoveled off

 

[H.E. Pennypacker]

I'm confused (but that comes easy). I like the effort, MGC, and I think somewhere you wrote about all the assumptions that go into this. That's good. But having a table like this suggests that my canoe # 3570 was the very first Morris produced in 1906, and the one before it was the very last one produced in 1905. I know that's not what you intend because I've been reading the threads, but that's what the table suggests. No disrespect at all, but I guess I just think "why try?" with almost no data to base this on.

Anyway, beyond that, this new table has some funky numbers. 1909 goes to 6744, but then 1910 starts with 6636 (more than 100 canoes earlier). This odd "series" continues like this for years forward. 1911-1912 goes from 8769 to 8200.

No complaints. Just confused.

H

 

[Treewater]

For all the discussion I'm going to favor Kathy and party. I have done chart assemblies of my own at various times and a few bench marks are all you really need. After that you start approximation based on what is "possible." Unless someone shows some catastrophic event it seems safe to presume canoe production was regular and followed a trend. This would have been true for any industry and any product. Factories that made only one product are easiest to project since even employment and marketing factors follow trends. I am always impressed the way anthropologists create a whole skeleton from just a few bones.
Thank you Kathy and everyone else. I'd guess your charts are 80% accurate and that over the years you will approach, but never reach, 100%

 

[pklonowski]

Remember that the table is a "Best Estimate" based on a few known shipping dates, as Treewater indicated. Even with Old Towns, sometimes they ran an overstock, and canoes didn't get shipped out n order of production -- they'd build up a stockpile, then start shipping from the top of the stockpile, and the "older" boats got shipped after the more recently-produced ones.

All the same, it's great to have this as a resource -- producing it took a lot of effort. Thank you!

 

[MGC]

All, I know/knew that re-opening this would trigger some more discussion.
Except to correct the poor assumptions about war build drop off in the original table that I gave Kathy I would have left this alone.
Assuming that you buy into any of the other very broad assumption that lead to having a table at all, then you should be able to agree that the should be some correction made for war influenced revenue decline.

Keep in mind, to buy into any of this that the first thing that you needed to agree with is that the first tagged Morris was built in 1900.
No one has any idea if that is true or not. It could just as easily have been 1899 or 1901......no one knows.
So if you start with accepting that assumption then you can put the rest of this into context.

The reason I put a table together in the first place and the reason that it makes sense to have something is that it provides a general basis for approximating a possible date of construction. If we all refer to this as a guide then it eliminates the SWAG and self serving dating that was prevalent before this. It used to drive me nuts that every person owning or selling a Morris was 100% certain that theirs was built in 1906. Absurd. Mine has slipped up the charts and is now somewhere around 1916/17 or so. I used to say it was 1910/11 before I did this.

So, thanks for the feedback. I'll look back to see where I made mistakes and correct them once I find them. I'll try to circle back more quickly than I did last time....but goose season reopens tomorrow and that will get the priority!!!

 

[MGC]

Corrected Table and Graphs

I'll look back to see where I made mistakes and correct them once I find them. I'll try to circle back more quickly than I did last time....

First, Thanks for all that actually looked at the details and offered feedback. Especially thanks to H Pennypacker who spotted the error in the pre-war year sequences. After taking some time to look back at this I found I made a formula error and did not notice that my table revision also affected pre-1912 years (and oddly). It shouldn't have. The date and SN sequence to 1912 (where we have a decent benchmark date) should have been unchanged from the version that Kathy published last year.
Attached is the table corrected to reflect the sequences from the previous table to 1912 and the adjustments to the following years based upon Benson's summary of Old Town production.
As before, one graph illustrates OT vs. Morris and helps show orders of magnitude of Morris production vs. Old Town (less Kennebec and Carleton). The second graph gives a more granular view of how the Morris production roughly following the market conditions assuming that Old Town was representative of that. Keep in mind that Old Town was building to stock and that they may have been slow to scale production..... Presumably the smaller Morris company could not have built as much inventory...more speculation..


As always I am open for comments....I am confident that this spin on the table is a realistic scenario based upon all of the previously described assumptions.