Morris records at Old Town and Kennebec

Benson Gray

Canoe History Enthusiast
Staff member
A small assortment of records for partial Morris canoe builds were discovered many years ago in the Old Town repair records. See http://www.wcha.org/catalogs/morris/records/ for more about this. Many of these appear to be partially completed canoes that were filled, railed, fitted, finished, and shipped by Old Town in 1921 after the Morris factory burned in December of 1919. Both sides of the last one are shown below.

Morris is also known to have worked with Kennebec to build over 200 canoes in 1924 which were given Kennebec serial numbers in the 50,000 range. I was interested to discover some notes on page 143 of volume three in the Kennebec records which indicate that the first 16 of these may have also been issued Morris serial numbers in the 17,000 range. This page is shown below along with two of the following pages which confirm that these canoes were planked, finished, and shipped by Kennebec.

It would be interesting to find one of these and see what numbers they actually have.

Benson


Morris-17263.jpg




Morris-17263-b.jpg




KC-50000.jpg




KC-50000-a.jpg




KC-50000-b.jpg
 
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Canoe number 17263 has been the last recorded date in the Morris Dating table since you located this 1921 record.
Consequently, that is the final Morris date I use in the table. Clearly there is no way to know with any certainty what number hulls were in the Morris factory when it burned. There is also no way that we will ever know what number hull was the last to leave before the fire.
What this new information you are sharing highlights (perhaps) is that there is finally a possible case for an upside to the total numbers of hulls built by Morris.
I note that the tag number assigned to 50,000 is 17,674, a total number of 384 more canoes than I account for in the current table.
Did Morris build 1,600 canoes in the final year of his factory? He had (at the time of the fire) 25 employees. It seems unlikely that he would experience a nearly 30% demand increase over the final years of production, but the end of WWI could certainly have had some influence. So, perhaps.
The numbers you shared with me for Old Town from those years suggested an increase in sales (deliberate choice of terms, we recognize stockpiling affects our view of the actual builds) of beyond 100% from the prior year.
The conclusion here? It's time to dive into some making some minor tweaks to the dating table.
What I have always been very upfront about is that the Morris table is a bit of a house of cards. The amount of verified data that it was constructed with was embellished with numerous assumptions. I won't repeat all of these in that these were discussed at length here when I first rolled the table out. The Wayback machine could dredge up some of those old topics.
What is worth noting is that in recent years we have been able to obtain a few more solid data points that may be used to true up what we already know. I'm long overdue to update the table. I'm adding it to my winter project list.
Thanks for this post.
 
Anyone reading this who happens to own a Morris with a serial number that is 17264 or above, please share that information.
It would be interesting to learn that about hulls that were built in that last year before the big fire.
 
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