Steady Stream of Old Canoes Ending Up in Artisan’s Hands

Atop the blocky hulks of a pair of sawhorses rest the fluid lines of a 17-foot-long wood-and-canvas canoe.

Undergoing a complete restoration, the canoe, manufactured in 1922, is typical of the boats brought to Thomson Canoe Works in Norfolk, Conn. It had fallen into disrepair over the decades, but nonetheless is dear to someone.

Nearby, in various stages of repair, are nearly a dozen other canoes, almost all of them more than 30 years old, some much older.

“These canoes are mostly old family heirlooms,” said Schuyler W. Thomson, a craftsman who rebuilds each boat by hand and is the principal owner of the business. “Emotion and sentiment have a tremendous part to play here.”

Wood-and-canvas canoes, which flourished from about 1880 until the Great Depression, are experiencing a robust revival; all over North America people are pulling them out of garages and barns and giving them another look.

And Thomson is among just a few people in the United States who work full time restoring and building them. Often, before a boat can be returned to the water, before its varnished wood frame is fussed over by passersby, it will spend time at Thomson Boat Works.

The artisan who will revive these often-dilapidated hulls is a college-educated, middle-aged man who early in life realized canoes were his calling. Thomson, a history major and 1969 graduate of the University of Connecticut, taught school in Canton, Conn., for a decade before yielding to his love for wood canoes.

He learned to use a boat as a young child, at a family property on Long Island Sound. He later spent summers at a camp in Vermont, where he eventually became a canoe instructor and learned to repair wood-and-canvas boats at a time when few others knew how.

By then, fiberglass, aluminum and plastic boats had seized the market, and the people who knew how to work with wood and canvas were retiring or dying. “There was this period when nobody really knew much of anything,” he said. “I really had to teach myself.”

In 1980 and 1982, Thomson won national white-water canoeing championships, using modern, synthetic boats. He owns and still occasionally uses a plastic canoe, but only if a river is especially low and the canoe will bump a lot of rocks.

But even for white-water paddling on the Housatonic or Farmington rivers, which he enjoys, he prefers his wood-and-canvas canoe. Wood-and-canvas canoes are far tougher than people realize, he said.

“They weren’t created as works of art,” he said. “They were created as functional, usable tools. And the fact you can still use them now, 80, 90 or 100 years later, appeals maybe to the historian in me.”

On a recent day he and a partner, Ray Jansen, moved from boat to boat, sanding the ribs of one, applying a first coat of varnish to another, a step that enhanced the rich wood grain of the boat with each brush stroke. “This is one of the magic moments,” Thomson said. “You take this dull-looking wood and the coat of varnish comes on, and that wood comes right through the clear coating.”

No two boats that enter his shop are the same, and that, for Thomson, is the charm of the business.

Since opening his business 18 years ago, Thomson has become as much a part of the wood-and-canvas canoe revival as witness to it.

Now, instead of a couple of canoes in the shop and a few awaiting work outside, there are a dozen in the shop and more than 60 stored on racks outside. He is always busy.

The number of people like Thomson who are working with these boats, especially full time, is tiny, but appears to be growing along with the revival of interest in the boats themselves.

“I would say there are less than 15 people actually doing it full time, making a living at it,” said Rollin Thurlow of Atkinson, Maine, who opened Northwoods Canoe Co. there 20 years ago. “There are maybe 50 to 60 people doing it on a part-time or semi-serious basis.”

In Connecticut, at least two others work on wood-and-canvas canoes part time: Carl H. Williams in Salisbury and Ken Morrisroe in Brooklyn.

Thurlow and his partner, Jerry Stelmok, struggled to make a living when their business opened two decades ago, but no more.

Canoe & Kayak magazine, sensing that interest, issued its first edition this fall of Canoe Journal, a magazine devoted to wooden canoes. The magazine, based in Seattle, plans to publish Canoe Journal annually.

“Where in some sports and activities you get people passively or mildly interested, with wooden canoes people are either fanatic or getting there in a hurry,” said Bryan R. Chitwood, editor of Canoe & Kayak.

Meanwhile, membership in the Wooden Canoe Heritage Assn., a nonprofit organization based in Paul Smiths, N.Y., has doubled since 1990 and now has 2,050 members. It works to promote and preserve wooden canoes and their lore.

One reason for the heightened interest is that many canoeists who own plastic boats have decided they want a wood boat too. “People have more than one canoe today,” said Jeanne L. Bourquin, who restores and builds wood-and-canvas canoes at her business, Bourquin Boats, in Ely, Minn. “They have canoes for more than one occasion.”

The wood-and-canvas canoe dates from the late 19th century and is a descendant of the birch bark canoes the American Indians used. Instead of birch bark, canvas is used as the exterior sheath, over a frame of planking and ribs.

Wood-and-canvas canoes were the rage at the turn of century, when canoe clubs flourished and canoeing was a popular pastime, a way of socializing. Young men sometimes courted ladies who sat on large pillows in canoes that were broad and stable.

At the time, there were dozens of manufacturers. Thomson has restored 29 brands of wood-and-canvas canoes, including E.M. Whites, Chestnuts, Kennebecs and Penn Yans. “We had a Detroit Canoe Co. product in here about four years ago,” he said. “I had never even heard of the Detroit Canoe Co. before.”

Thomson’s business has grown largely through word-of-mouth and referrals from outfitters in Connecticut, who often send customers who inquire about repairs.

A typical restoration involves replacing the canvas, a half-dozen ribs, some planking and the gunwales; refinishing the seats, rebuilding the ends, which often rot over time, and stripping and revarnishing the interior. The whole job might cost $1,400. A new wood-and-canvas canoe typically costs at least $2,500.