My personal interests and hobbies.

Vintage canoe research project.

Dialogue with others about this project.

Phase III - Picking up where I left off - August 2006.

During the summer of 2006, the canoe was moved from is storage place to our home. This provided easy access to the craft to take measurements and photos. One day in August 2006, my wife and I spent some time cleaning the dust and dirt from the outside and inside of the canoe. This lead to some unexpected revelations.

I renewed my dialogue on the WCHA forum and also started looking through other postings to get a better understanding of the era in which these canoes were made.

2006-08-16:
I now have the canoe in my possession and can probe it in more detail. I am pretty sure it is a Walter Dean model manufactured in the 1920s or early 1930s. My wife found the purchase receipt from July 5, 1937 when her father bought it from the original owner in Toronto, Ontario. It is made of mahogany (I am fairly sure) and uses brass screws, tacks, battens and bow/stern protectors. It last saw water in 1976.

I love old, useful items (like woodworking tools) and would love to try getting this craft ready for use once again. Does anyone have recommendations for books or websites to get me started? I don't want to proceed to refinish the canoe without some idea of what I should do. I am hoping more modern finishes will hold better than the varnish now on it (but peeling and blistering). Thanks in advance.

David
Canoeing and sailing: separate and together.

The next day a new contributor joined the discussion thread -- Andre Cloutier -- who described himself as "an eventual canoe sailer." Andre said:

2006-08-17:
Wow, that is a great boat and its always nice to have its history - I only wish I had some photos and history on the boat I collected! Years ago during one of its former incarnations I was at the canoe museum and was going through some of the archives; I remember there was some great obscure material on Walter Dean, but I'm sure Dick Persson would know better what they have that might give some further info on your boat.

The reference to Dick Persson was to prove to be a great lead. Before I heard from Dick, I created this website and posted a message informing the forum members that I had done so. On the way back from a trip to Toronto my wife and I stopped at the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ontario. I updated the forum on the result of my conversation with one of the staff at the Museum, Jeremy Ward, the Public Programming Supervisor (now Curator):

2006-09-15:
I visited the Canadian Canoe Museum last week and the fellow I spoke to for about 45 minutes also believes it is a Walter Dean canoe, but there are some puzzling inconsistencies which need to be researched further.

Very quickly, Greg Nolan responded to the post saying, "From your photos, it looks like Hicks & Sons would fit." At about the same time, the first post came from a very knowledgeable individual named Dick Persson, a canoe builder and restorer located in Buckhorn, Ontario, Canada. He told me:

2006-09-16: Dear David,
Almost everything points to Walter Dean; the torpedo stems, the metallic joint batten, rib spacing, workmanship and material selection. The details not fitting are the burned in markings and the decking, but the decks might be a special order detail.

Did you include the outside gunnels in the beam measurement? Beam measurements should be taken to outside of the planking at the hulls widest point, not including the outside gunnels. If so measuring without the gunnels should give you a beam of 30 inches or so which fits well with Dean’s 15 1/2 foot model

By the way the planking on your canoe is not basswood it is most likely Red cedar or maybe Spanish cedar. Dean also built luxury versions of his models in Mahogany.

It is hard to get much from the photo of the burned in markings, have you been able to decode any letters beside “builders”?

There was a handful of other small builders around Humber Bay, Toronto; O.L. Hicks. Hicks & Son, H.F. Hodson (W. Deans mentor and employer for 7 years), Aykroyd & Sons, Robert Maw and others.

Some of those builders are known to have copied W. Dean, but I am not sure if any of those will fit in this case.

Dick Persson
Headwater Wooden Boat Shop (now Buckhorn Canoe Company)

I did not waste any time responding to this information. Later the same day, I said:

Dick:
Many thanks for your post. From what I can make of the letters on the brand, HICKS & SON (singular, not plural) would fit the lettering pattern in my photo. Since my father-in-law's family lived near High Park, Toronto and used the Sunnyside Beach and Humber River as regular haunts, it would seem natural that they could have seen Hicks crafts.

As to the builders brand mark, no, I cannot make out anything of the names. The photo on my website has been enhanced through Photoshop as best as I can. Maybe if I could use some of that great CSI-type computer magic I might be able to get more information.

In reference to the beam measurement, I just went outside and unwrapped the canoe to measure again. Yes, I did include the gunnels when I measured. The new measurement would be 31 inches as the gunnels are exactly one inch wide. (As I note on my website, there have been some modifications made to the gunnels area - however, I believe it was to eliminate the inboard portion. The historical pictures are not exceedingly sharp, but there does seem to be a wider gunnel. No matter, the beam is 31 inches at the midpoint (where the brand marks are on each side).)

Do you or anyone else have any leads on where I might find out about H.L. Hicks? Do you know around what time period he manufactured boats?

I really appreciate all the assistance you *all* have been offering me in this quest. I am more hopeful of tracing the history of this craft than I have ever been.

Note: The brand mark referred to in the note looked like this (click the image for a larger version):

The next day, Dick provided more information:

2006-09-17: David,
During the heyday of canoeing in Toronto, 1890’s to 1920’s the City directory shows 19 canoe and boat builders, many of them also operating sizeable livery operations. Most of them around the base of York Street, but Walter Dean’s success at Sunnyside Beach and Humber had encouraged many of them to centre there as well.

Octavius L. Hicks had established his boatbuilding business and livery operations there already in the late 1870’s. Octavius Hicks was a man of many talents and owned or was involved in many enterprises; commercial fishing fleet, road and bridge contracting business, brick yards, Humber Steam Ferry Company and for awhile the Royal Oak Hotel at Humber Bay. His son William J. Hicks was early on running the boat and livery business and stayed in that business all his life, still operating in the mid 1950’s.

However, very few boats and canoes were built by the Hicks after WWI, who instead concentrated on the boat livery aspect of the business, and often purchased his rental boats from other builders. However, I doubt that this is a Hicks built canoe as I have found no proof of them ever building a metallic joint canoe. It is possible that your canoe might have been a rental canoe in the Hicks fleet built by Walter Dean, thus the brand mark possibly saying Hicks & Son.

Dick Persson
Headwater Wooden Boat Shop

While all of this discussion was transpiring, I was reading, and enjoying immensely, a recent book on the history of the canoe by John Jennings. It is called: The Canoe, A Living Tradition and published by Firefly Books. What caught my eye in particular was a small section dealing with the type of canoe I was researching.

The Metallic Batten Canoe
During this period, the Gordon Canoe Co. in Lakefield had been growing in a similar fashion. Anchored in the dugout tradition, Gordon continued to explore the possibilities of the board-and-batten canoe. The problem of the wide planks shrinking was addressed (but not eliminated) by using narrower planks. While this helped to cure one problem, it created others. More planks also meant more joints to be backed up with seam battens, each joint between batten and rib taking time to fit and providing more potential places to leak. Gordon knew that Stephenson was on to something with the machined edge that created an unbroken seal between the planks from bow to stern. But he was still thinking along the lines of covering up the joint rather than fitting one part of a plank into a space in another when he started using metallic battens, the next step in the evolution of the wide-board canoe. The Lakefield Canoe Company claimed to have used this method prior to 1880.

The metallic batten was a channel of light metal, either galvanized steel or brass, that resembled a long row of short-legged staples. The channel straddled the joint between the two planks on the inside of the hull, with one leg embedded in each plank, held in place by friction and the ribs.

Building a wide-board canoe using the metallic batten began with the usual keelson, stems and ribs. While the metallic batten would back up the joint, allow for expansion and keep the water out, it would not support the plank edges between the traditional six-inch rib spacing. Without the support provided by the raised batten, the span would eventually need to be reduced. As Stephenson had done with the cedar-rib, Gordon simply added two extra ribs between the old rib positions on his wide-board form. This increased the number of ribs without having to change the form.

To install the plank, a slit about one-sixteenth of an inch deep was cut parallel to the edge of the plank with a cutting gauge (similar to a marking gauge) and one leg of the batten was carefully pressed into it. The plank was then nailed to the ribs and stems. The next plank, with the slit cut in the edge, was pressed over the other leg of the batten and the plank nailed into position. This is much easier said than done, considering that the plank, which was under a great deal of tension from being bent in two directions at once, had to be fit up to the last plank then pressed straight down over the leg of the batten without bending it over or breaking off the edge of the plank.

Incredibly beautiful canoes were built using this technique, none finer than the Sunnyside Cruiser built by Walter Dean in Toronto. Dean combined Spanish cedar planking with brass battens and lots of varnish to take this method to the extreme. He opened his boat shop at Sunnyside Beach in Toronto in 1888 when he was nineteen. A very inventive builder and mechanic, he had a great imagination and an eye for beauty. He became known for his exquisite paddling and sailing canoes that populated the Toronto Islands and Sunnyside Beach.

The Canoe: A Living Tradition, John Jennings, Firefly Books, pp. 174-176

The book also gave an insight to the addition of sails to a canoe in this passage:

The desire to get out of the cities and away from the comforts and conventions of civilized life was not peculiar to North America. Nor was the interest in doing so in a small boat. On a sort of Grand Tour in reverse in 1859, a Scot named John MacGregor sampled several Native boat types in Upper Canada and the north, paddling a birchbark canoe, a dugout and a kayak. When he returned to Britain, he had a boatbuilder there build him a small boat of the general form and size of a small kayak, but with European plank-on-frame construction. MacGregor had a double-bladed paddle made to go with it, as he had seen in the Arctic, but he added a tiny lug-sail and jib, which had not been used there. The sails were only intended as auxiliary power. There was no center-board or leeboard, and MacGregor used his paddle as a rudder. The size of Rob Roy, named after the original of the character in Sir Walter Scott's novels and an ancestor of MacGregor's, was determined by the maximum size allowed on German railway carriages, for MacGregor proposed a European cruise using trains to travel between watersheds. Rob Roy was fifteen feet long, had a beam of twenty-eight inches, was nine inches deep and weighed eighty pounds.

Ibid, p 200. (Emphasis added.)

Dick Persson continued to provide invaluable information through his postings. I followed up on his information about Hicks with the following:

2006-10-03: Dick:
Again, thanks for the additional information. This is really helping me to understand the historical context.

To the group: If we assume this is indeed a Walter Dean canoe that was a rental, where did Dean mark his craft with a serial number? I am assuming the 115 stamped into the keelson is more likely a Hicks addition for rental purposes and not something placed there by Dean. I have looked at the inboard stem area and cannot see anything resembling a plate or other marking. Did Dean mark all his craft, or only certain ones?

I really wanted to get a little closer to a manufacturing date for this craft. Are there any build records (like there are for the Old Towns) or other sources of info?

I am getting hooked on this history of canoes and loving it!

Dick again provided historical context with his next posting, which said:

2006-10-04:
If we assume your canoe is a Walter Dean.

W. Dean marked his canoes with a serial number on the inside stem, sometimes on the keelson, sometimes on the thwarts and occasionally not at all. I have seen 3 digit numbers as well as 4 digit numbers.

Unfortunately there are no known build records. However, your canoe has what is called a torpedo stem supposedly first used by W. Dean, this model came out around 1915 or 1916.

Walter Dean retired from the business around 1919 or 1920.

The shop was completely destroyed by fire in 1920; W. Dean’s sons rebuilt but closed the manufacturing part of the business late 1923. The sons concentrated on the rental aspect of the business and only built canoes for their rental fleet. The company declared bankruptcy in 1931.

This post also included a photo (https://forums.wcha.org/attachments/dean-thwart-jpg.2099/) of a serial number stamped into the thwart of a Walter Dean canoe. I tried to determine if the form of the numbers used had any similarities to those used on my canoe. This was difficult because the fore and aft numbers did not seem to be made from the same stamps based on what I could determine from photos for this project:

The research continues:

• Phase IV - Other contacts in 2006.
• Phase V - Other contacts from 2007 to date.

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