Searching for owner history and valuation info on retored Old Town Canoe with Serial #L81597 pr possibly #181597... I have included a photo of the number but I cannot tell if the first symbol is a letter or a number..
I won this at an art auction and I've been told this was formerly owned by Andy Rooney. I would like verification please.
Welcome and congratulations, the Old Town with serial number 181957 is a 15 foot long Trapper model with a keel. It was built between November and December, 1968. The original fiberglass exterior was clear to show the natural wood. It shipped on August 7th, 1970 to Bolton Landing, New York. A scan showing this build record can be found below.
This scan and 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 donate, join or renew your membership to the WCHA so that services like this can continue. See https://www.woodencanoe.org/about to learn more about the WCHA and https://www.woodencanoe.org/shop to donate or join.
It is also possible that you could have another number or manufacturer if this description doesn't match. Old Town serial numbers don't contain letters. The information at the link below and similar canoes listed at https://www.woodencanoe.org/classifieds should help you value it. This canoe shipped to a dealer in the Lake George area. Andy Rooney is known to have owned canoes and spent time in the Lake George region but nothing in this build record confirms that he ever owned this canoe. Feel free to reply here if you have any other questions. Good luck with your research,
How much is my old canoe worth? One of the most common questions that gets sent to the WCHA webmasters is "how much is my old canoe worth?" Tim Hewitt's responses over the years have included the following comments: Any wooden or wood/canvas canoe in usable condition is worth $1000 - $1500. A...
The build record Benson posted is the best we can do here unless someone who knows this particular canoe happens to be viewing this thread and chimes in (which seems extremely unlikely). There is no way for our organization to systematically help with ownership history on canoes. Many thousands of wooden canoes have been built over many years by many manufacturers, and ownership details on most of them are lost to history. Yours is a fairly recent canoe, being only a half-century old (!), so you might have some luck in tracing its history yourself. The place to start, obviously, is with the auctioneer, but auction organizers are often unwilling or unable to provide contact information for previous owners who themselves may wish to maintain their privacy. In short, getting detailed history on an old canoe can be fun and possibly even important, but it is also tough.
We often hear of canoes (like many other things) having been owned by someone "special" but these are often just stories. Even so, famous people are still people, and many have owned and paddled canoes. In this story said to be by Andy Rooney, he describes his family having two canoes on "a lake in northern New York State."
The same story also describes the family's outboard motor boat, a rowboat, and a Hacker runabout. Here is an inboard for sale, said to have been owned by Andy Rooney but it's a Chris Craft, not a Hacker:
