A 20’ Old Town Guide,
The Old Town Guide seems to preserve what I've called the circular radius stem seen in Old Town's OTCA and 50 Pounder.
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Happy Mathematics Day! ❌📐♾️
Looking at Stem Curves and Geometry
- Thread starter Glenn MacGrady
- Start date
The Old Town Guide seems to preserve what I've called the circular radius stem seen in Old Town's OTCA and 50 Pounder.
If you look closely, this canoe has no inwales. In my opinion, it's a transition model from narrow ribbed and batten or tongue & groove plank construction to conventional flat rib and plank/canvas construction. With no inwale there is no way to hang seats as we currently use them. The (apparently original) thwarts are somewhat wider than current thwarts so are more comfortable to kneel/lean against or perhaps sit upon, presumably for day use rather than extended trips. The thwarts rest on and are attached to short cleats which are through-screwed into the ribs from the exterior- 3 screws at each cleat.
With regard to the stem profile, I have no idea why the shape. Perhaps any stem projection beyond the waterline is simply aesthetic.
This article has some great research but there isn't universal agreement with the conclusions. My thoughts about early canvas canoes are summarized in the link below. I'm not sure that we have enough details to ever know exactly who did what and when. Sales literature is often not the most reliable source of historical information.
Benson
Early canvas canoe information
I recently stumbled over the comments about Gerrish canoes below on page 82 of The New England Magazine - Volume 13; Volume 19 at https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_New_England_Magazine/-0JIMssMuk8C from 1895. Does anyone know of any other similar comments about who is credited with...
Here are a couple that have come through my shop.
A 15’ Robertson.
A 16’ Old Town HW model with sponsons.
An 18’ Old Town HW Model.
A 17’ Peterborough
And last for now is a 17’ Kennebeck.
Sorry some of the pics are not great, they are hasty phone pics of old slides.
Jim
A 15’ Robertson.
A 16’ Old Town HW model with sponsons.
An 18’ Old Town HW Model.
A 17’ Peterborough
And last for now is a 17’ Kennebeck.
Sorry some of the pics are not great, they are hasty phone pics of old slides.
Jim
I thought I wanted a 20' OT Guide, but Jerry Stelmok talked me out of it. He said they were made more for being used with a motor and that the 20' White would be a much better paddling boat. It's 20 lbs. lighter too.
20’ EM White Guide. I love the boat, but not the stem or sheer line.
Lovely canoe, Al. What is it you don't like about the stems and sheer?
It's just aesthetics Glenn. The stems look like big wind catchers to me, but I think that is due to the sheer line. I prefer the look of a flatter sheer and lower profile. I can't complain about how it paddles though.
I'd agree that self-interested statements, such as those found in sales literature, should be viewed with some skepticism. But that skepticism is less warranted when a person is making what evidence law calls an "admission against interest", which in the case of sales literature would mean giving credit to a competitor. Morris clearly gives credit to Gerrish as the first to commercially produce canvas covered canoes, except he says those canoes were simply substitutes of canvas for birch bark in a traditional outside-in construction.
I see nothing in the sources you cite on your forum, including The Way of the Woods book excerpt, that contradicts the thesis that Gerrish's canvas canoes were just substitutes of canvas for the bark of Indian canoes. Ranco's obituary, which is another self-interested source, to the effect that Ranco "conceived the idea of using canvas in place of birch bark and was the builder of the first canvas covered canoe", is completely consistent with a conclusion that Ranco built the same thing as early Gerrish—i.e., NOT a canoe with transverse ribs tacked to longitudinal planks covered with canvas, not a modern "solid-plank shell" canvas canoe.
As candidates for the first maker of solid-plank shell canvas canoes, the only documented candidates seem to be Gerrish, Morris, Ranco and Stephenson in Canada. Gerrish and Ranco have been addressed and reasonably rejected. Other men, such as a "Yankee" up by Moosehead Lake and some guides, supposedly produced canvas canoes in the late 1870's to early 1880's, but the slim evidence for them is that they, too, were early Gerrish/Ranco types of construction (canvas substituted for Indian bark).
Stephenson's 1879 Canadian patent and the Peterborough Review newspaper article seem to describe a canoe with transverse planks, no ribs, and a covering of "paper or cotton or other textile fabric". This is NOT a canoe with internal ribs tacked onto longitudinal planks at all, much less definitively covered with canvas, plus no example of one covered by canvas is known to have been found. Hence, Stephenson fails as the father of the modern rib-longitudinal plank-canvas canoe. As does the 1871 Canadian patent to John Herald, which was only for a machine to clench nails.
Notwithstanding that some of the affirmative evidence comes from his own catalogs, this history all leaves Morris reasonably standing as the first commercial producer of rib-longitudinal plank-canvas canoes somewhere between 1887-1889. No one disputes that Morris in fact produced such canoes somewhere in this time period, and the positive evidence for the other candidates falls far short or is affirmatively contradictory.
Old Town Otca (front) and Old Town Carleton.
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