![]() Other innovations – especially the Discovery canoe – allowed it to return to profitability and regain its title as the world’s largest canoe maker. He did it in Tinkerbelle, a 13.5-foot Whitecap sailboat made by Old Town Canoe.īy then Old Town had finally begun experimenting with new materials, and in 1965 it built its first fiberglass canoe. In 1965, a Cleveland Plain Dealer copyeditor named Robert Manry sailed alone from Falmouth, Mass., to Falmouth, England. And Deane Gray, George’s grandson, had a sign on his desk that said, ““If God wanted fiberglass boats, he would have made fiberglass trees!”īy the early 1960s, the company’s sales dwindled to 200 canoes a year.īy then, the company also made motorboats and sailboats. The Grays’ descendants, who still owned the company, thought aluminum kayaks were ugly and refused to make them. By the mid-1940s, the company ran five logging operations to get enough wood to meet demand.īut after the war, Old Town Canoe faced increasing competition from aluminum and fiberglass canoes. It was then the biggest canoe maker in the world. In 1940, Old Town Canoe made its first kayak – a wood-and-canvas model. In 1917 they introduced the motorized canoe with a square stern to which an outboard motor could be attached. A Canadian canoe maker tried to lure the Old Town boat builders away, and the Old Town Canoe Company brought suit against its northern competitor. The Grays bought one of the other Old Town canoe companies, Carleton, and began making bateaux as well. The video below, by Thomas Edison, gives you an idea of just how popular canoeing had gotten by 1904.īy 1910, Old Town Canoe had 60 employees, many of whom were local Penobscot. The young lady would face him, sitting on a pillow on the bottom and enjoying the ride. The young man would paddle from the back thwart. Young people especially liked courting canoes. Their wood-and-canvas canoe sold quickly, bolstered by a craze for canoeing. Some of those survived for a hundred years.Ī postcard highlights one of the benefits of owning a canoe. In 1901 they bought a former shoe factory on Middle Street and began making canoes out of it. George and his brother Herbert didn’t build boats, but they hired people who did. Wickett to build a wood-and-canvas canoe behind his hardware store. Old Town Canoeīy 1898, 15 factories reportedly made canoes in the Old Town area. Wickett worked for him, and later for the Old Town Canoe Company. White saw one of Gerrish’s canoes and started making his own in Old Town. Gerrish may have been the first, selling them from his shop in Bangor, 12 miles from Old Town. They began making wood and canvas canoes. Sometime after the Civil War, the birchbark canoe inspired canoe makers in and near Old Town. Rivermen on the Mooselookmeguntic Lake in Maine during the spring 1943 pulpwood drive. Going without a boat in 19 th century Maine would be like not having a car or a truck today. I told him I thought that I could make a canoe, but he expressed great doubt of it at any rate he thought that my work would not be “neat” the first time. But the former said, “No good, break, can’t split ’em.” Francis Indians thought that white spruce roots might be best. Our Indian said that he used black spruce roots to sew canoes with, obtaining it from high lands or mountains. Francis native about the kind of spruce root to use in a birch bark canoe. He recounted a discussion between Polis and a St. In 1857, Henry David Thoreau took a canoe trip with his Penobscot guide, Joseph Polis, from Bangor to the Allagash Lakes and back. Then they’d sink the canoe in the fall and raise it in the spring to keep the bark pliable. They used ash and cedar for the gunwales, spruce root and sap to plug the cracks and cedar strips for the thwarts. To do it, the Penobscot used one piece of birchbark from stem to stern. A Wabanaki birchbark canoe from the 19th century on display at the Pejebscot Historical Society in Brunswick, Maine.
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