The Old Town canoe with serial number 48970 is a 16 foot long, CS (common sense or middle) grade, Charles River model with red western cedar planking, closed spruce gunwales, birch decks, birch thwarts, birch seats, and a keel. It was built between March and April, 1917. The original exterior paint color was dark green. It shipped on May 3rd, 1917 to Montreal, Canada. A scan of this build record can be found by following the link at the attached thumbnail image below.
This scan and several hundred thousand others were created with substantial grants from the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association (WCHA) and others as you probably know well. A description of the project to preserve these records is available at
http://www.wcha.org/ot_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-the-wcha/ to learn more about the WCHA and
http://store.wcha.org/WCHA-New-Membership.html to renew.
It is also possible that you could have another number or manufacturer if this description doesn't match your canoe. My guess is that 40970 as shown at
http://forums.wcha.org/showthread.php?8389 is the correct one. The tricks described at
http://forums.wcha.org/showthread.php?791 may help. Please post some pictures of the numbers from each end so we all can speculate. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions.
Benson
