I took another dive into arcane and obscure canoe history yesterday and created a summary of the building forms shown in the available inventories from the Old Town Canoe Company. This information is now available at http://forums.wcha.org/attachment.php?attachmentid=23871&d=1355023548 in the WCHA KnowledgeBase. It is in Adobe's portable document format (PDF) so you will need to download their free viewer first if you haven't already. Adding information to the KnowledgeBase can be a bit confusing and intimidating at first but I would encourage everyone to make the effort since this is an excellent resource that should get even better over time.
The known inventories run from October 31st, 1905 to January 1st, 1936. They contain an amazing amount of information right down to the number of boxes of screws, brooms, etc. They occasionally just wrote "Same as last year" in the forms section with some notes about the number of new forms that were added during the year so these are flagged in the first two rows of the chart. There are also some obvious errors. The 15 foot long fifty pound model form disappears in 1918 and a 15 foot long Guide Special form shows up. I've never found a catalog listing for a Guide model in this length so I'm guessing that this information is not correct but I have included it as shown. It is also interesting that the 34 foot war canoe form was not listed in 1913 and 1914. It is possible that the old one was discarded and a new one was built a few years later but this doesn't seem likely. However, it seems even less realistic that anyone would miss something 34 feet long when doing an inventory.
Take a look and feel free to reply here if you have any questions or comments.
Benson
The known inventories run from October 31st, 1905 to January 1st, 1936. They contain an amazing amount of information right down to the number of boxes of screws, brooms, etc. They occasionally just wrote "Same as last year" in the forms section with some notes about the number of new forms that were added during the year so these are flagged in the first two rows of the chart. There are also some obvious errors. The 15 foot long fifty pound model form disappears in 1918 and a 15 foot long Guide Special form shows up. I've never found a catalog listing for a Guide model in this length so I'm guessing that this information is not correct but I have included it as shown. It is also interesting that the 34 foot war canoe form was not listed in 1913 and 1914. It is possible that the old one was discarded and a new one was built a few years later but this doesn't seem likely. However, it seems even less realistic that anyone would miss something 34 feet long when doing an inventory.
Take a look and feel free to reply here if you have any questions or comments.
Benson
Last edited:
