In The Old Days, Canoes Were Made For Romance—among Other Things

"I wouldn't call the Shell Lake 'crude,' " interrupted Jill, who's less finicky than Jeff. "I'd call it elemental."

A great deal of the Deans' mail is from people who have just dusted off that old wooden canoe hanging in the barn rafters and want to know who made it and what it's worth. The Deans refer to these mystery canoes as UFOs—Unidentified Floating Objects—and Jill, a law student at the University of Wisconsin, does most of the detective work. She'll start by telling the owner to look for certain telltale features on the canoe. Old Town, for instance, uses diamond-shaped bolts to fasten seats to the hull and imprints a serial number on each boat's stem. Jill also finds clues in a filing cabinet of old canoe catalogs. Tracking down UFOs is time-consuming work, but on one occasion it brought Jill a real find.

"My law professor, George Foster, asked me to look at an old canoe that he and his wife, Jimmy, had in their backyard," she says. "They thought it was an Old Town, but I knew it wasn't. I was struck by the closed gunwales and splayed stem band, and I remembered a friend restoring a canoe just like it. At the end of my midterm law exam, I wrote, 'It's a Morris!' When I got the exam back, my professor had written: 'Do you want it?' "

In the early 1900s the three leading canoe-builders in Maine were B.N. Morris in Veazie, and Old Town and E.M. White, located within a block of each other in the city of Old Town. Morris turned out distinctive craft, with graceful sheer lines in the bow and stern, from 1887 until 1920, when an arsonist burned the place down. The Fosters' canoe, it turned out, had been shipped new from Veazie to a distributor in Chicago, who sold it in 1910 for $48.50 to Mr. & Mrs. Alfred Bartelme, who gave it as a high school graduation present to their daughter. Seventy-two years later, the daughter's daughter, Jimmy Foster, would give that canoe to Jill Dean.

Because the canoe had remained in one family until it came to Jill, its history remained intact. The Morris had been in use at the Bartelmes' family cottage in northern Michigan until it was brought home to Madison, where it was once lost overnight on Lake Mendota. It washed ashore the following day. When Jill received it, the Morris was in rough shape, and so, as a graduation present to herself, Jill is having it restored at Freedom Boat Works, less than an hour's drive north of Madison. "I want it to be done quickly," she says, "because I promised Jimmy a ride in it when I graduate from law school this month."

The Morris is being repaired in the tiny (pop. 616) town of North Freedom, Wis., at a century-old farmstead high in the hills of the Baraboo Range. The barn that once held Holsteins now houses Freedom Boat Works, run by Rick Heinzen and his brother-in-law Tony Bries. They build six or seven wooden boats a year, mostly during the warm months. In the winter, when the barn is heated with a wood stove, they repair old boats. When Bries first saw the Morris, he looked dolefully at the canoe. "You could build a new boat faster than you could repair this one," he said as he stood amid stacks of cedar, oak, ash and butternut in the dimness of the hayloft. "The hull is in good shape, but everything else is shot. Decks are gone. Stems too. Some ribs have to be replaced."

Bries had to take off the decks and gunwales, rip off the red canvas, strip off the old varnish so he could renail the planking and replace the broken ribs. He had to cut new mahogany for the deck, using an old Morris catalog for the sectional shapes. Then the canoe had to be recanvased and varnished.

On a recent afternoon Bries sighted along the Morris' gunwales and remarked to a visitor, "Kind of a fat canoe—37 inches at the beam, so I figure this model was their courting boat . You know, about the time Morris was making these boats, Old Town sold red wool blankets to put in the bottom of their canoes." He paused and smiled. "They also had a removable center seat."

The history of modern canoeing, according to Bries, falls into three distinct eras. In the so-called Golden Age (1870-1900), canoeists in decked, all-cedar canoes made sporting news by exploring the headwaters of rivers or racing one another in elaborate regattas. Only the privileged few, however, could afford these miniature yachts, one of which might cost what a laborer earned in a month.

In Phase Two canoeing became really popular with the appearance of open wood and canvas craft at the turn of the century. Cheaper and roomier than the esoteric canoe yawls, open canoes like the Morris or E.M. White brought to the nation's waterways more democratic pursuits—such as crooning to one's sweetheart between paddle strokes. In an age when the automobile was still considered just a noisy curiosity, the canoe, paddled out to the middle of a lake or slipped beneath an overhanging willow, offered a measure of privacy and the possibility of romance.