Old Towns Bought by E. L. Marks of Old Town Ny

[monkitoucher]

Mr. Price has one of his boats on the WCHA classified section. His boat and mine, share the same order number (#6015). Would it be possible to see what other boats were on that order?

I was also curious to find out if there was a way to research how many boats were purchased by E. L. Marks of Old Forge NY for his boat livery business. If' it's a simple database query great. Anything beyond that–like real research–don't worry about it.

Here are some of the boats that I was able to dig up that have been found just by standard queries here:
One in 1930
Old Town 106144 - 16

My boat in 1922
http://www.wcha.org/forums/index.php?threads/68927-–-17.15213/#post-76797

One ordered in 1919
Serial # Search Request

One Ordered in 1909
Old Town Serial Number

Another one ordered in 1909 (different order number)
Has anyone seen this?

One Ordered in 1906
5canoe

If you have one of his canoes please feel free to add it to this thread. It would be cool to see them.

Here's mine

 

[Benson Gray]

Would it be possible to see what other boats were on that order?

The short answer is not really. The order number was not captured in the database project and they aren't easily read by the available optical character recognition tools. This means that you would need to manually search through a few thousand build records if you wanted to find them. These records are available from http://www.wcha.org/store/old-town-canoe-company-build-record-archive-2-dvd-set and I can offer some tools to help simplify the process if you want to proceed. I completed a similar research project for a Molitor order as described at http://forums.wcha.org/index.php?threads/michigan-chapter.15944/#post-80557 for example. Let me know if this doesn't answer your question.

Benson

 

[monkitoucher]

That's what I figured. I'd assume that the records are broken down by the serial number.

 

[Benson Gray]

I'd assume that the records are broken down by the serial number.

Yes, the original build records are sorted by serial number and stored in wooden boxes with about 1000 records in each one. The scanned record images mirror this structure with one folder per box. They started using typewriters for addresses in the early 1930s so you can often get optical character recognition to work with this information. Your canoe is too old for that, unfortunately. It isn't difficult to crop the record images so that you only see the order number area. This makes it easier to display many at once and scan through them quickly. However, it remains a manual process.

Benson

 

[monkitoucher]

Found another one here