Last spring, when the teenage apprentices at Minnesota’s Urban Boatbuilders, Inc. (UBI) peeled back the battered skin of the 1915 Old Town canoe they sought to restore, they were both uncovering the fascinating history of an old boat as well as pulling open a curtain that they and their mentors hope will lead to a better future for each of them.

The apprentices, at-risk young men and women from Minneapolis and St. Paul, were using the project and others like it to learn useful skills and steer clear the of actions that had landed many of them within the grip of the juvenile justice system, typically for thefts, assaults, or gang-related activities. They were yet another class of the more than 50 apprentices who have passed through the unique, St. Paul-based after-school mentoring and skill acquisition program since its inception in 1995.

The canoe, which had, through its sequence of owners, slowly meandered to the Midwest since leaving the storied canoe factory in Old Town, Maine during World War I, found itself on UBI’s sawhorses when its most recent owner decided UBI was the proper stopping place for a canoe that her father, a dedicated woodworker with a history of supporting underprivileged families, bought in the 1980s as a project of his own.

Together, the old canoe and the young men and women of UBI were attempting to navigate to a calm-water future.

The Canoe
Nearly a hundred years ago, an Old Town H.W. model left the Old Town factory, resplendent in its green paint, in the middle of what was the golden age of wood-canvas canoe manufacturing in the United States. Old Town, established in 1900 in a city already known for its canoe-builders, was producing more than 6,000 boats a year in the early 1910s. The handsome boats were sold to citizens of an increasingly urban nation that saw a growing need for outdoor recreation in the natural world.

The boat currently in the hands of Minnesota’s early 21^st-Century youths, largely from Hispanic, Hmong, and African-American backgrounds, was originally sold by Old Town to one E.W. Woolman for $41. Indeed, the stamped name “Woolman” can still be read on the boat’s fore and aft breast-hooks. While the canoe’s earliest travels are lost to time, Barbara “Babs” Pilling of St. Paul, the donor of the boat to UBI, thinks the craft likely spent many of its years at the Pocono Lake Preserve, a rustic Quaker camping and recreation area in Pennsylvania, established, like Old Town, in the early 20^th century. It was there that the boat likely received the red paint it sported until the UBI apprentices peeled back its canvas skin in late 2007.

The Woolman family, like Pilling’s own, had a long history at the Pocono Lake Preserve. She thinks it’s likely that the boat was painted red – inside and out – by at Pocono Lake for its part in the Preserve’s unique, summer-long, red-versus-blue contest. Members of the Preserve are each designated as members of either the red or blue team – color allegiances are held for life and cross family lines.

“Everybody is either a red or a blue,” Pilling explained. “There’s tennis tournaments, water games, field games, there’s baseball games, there’s nature projects, there’s sighting birds and animals in the woods, there’s … you-name-it!”

The Woolman family – probably the generation that owned the boat originally, Pilling believes – endowed the ice cream social that follows the final day of competition in each summer’s red-versus-blue contest. The day – called Woolman Day, naturally enough – features a long, multi-event relay that climaxes with a canoeing leg featuring red and blue canoes. 

Pilling can’t prove absolutely that the boat plied the waters of Pocono Lake, but makes a sound case from the circumstantial evidence. “Pocono Lake Preserve is how we know the Woolman family and where my dad worked on it,” Babs Pilling said.


Dr. George Pilling
Babs Pilling’s father, Dr. George “Chip” Pilling was a pediatric surgeon in Philadelphia who enjoyed working with wood in his spare time. Babs Pilling assumes her father got the boat from someone in the Woolman family with the idea of restoring it in his spare time. “They probably gave it to him,” Babs Pilling said. After doing some minor repairs to the boat, Dr. Pilling gave the boat to his daughter as a gift shortly before his death in 1986.

“He fixed it up,” she said. “It was the kind of fun thing he liked to do in the summertime, is fix up stuff – to do whatever woodworking projects he could get his hands on. I believe the fixing up meant possibly replacing the gunwales, possibly doing some fiberglass patching.”

Babs Pilling owned the boat for some 25 years, but only paddled it once after tearing up the hull on a low-water trip down Wisconsin’s Kinnikkinick River in 1989. The boat rested on a rack in her garage until construction of a new garage in 2007 forced a decision about the canoe. A friendship with UBI Executive Director David Gagne prompted Babs Pilling to consider donating it to the organization, and further reflection led her to believe UBI was exactly where he father’s boat should go.

“He worked with underprivileged families a lot,” Babs Pilling remembered. “When he had any spare time in his later years, he used to go over to the local school and help in their woodworking shop. All the kids knew him as Dr. Pilling who had come to help, and he just loved it. They gave him a big wooden wrench when he left. For me, it was an emotionally appropriate thing to do, to give it to these kids who could really learn from it and really appreciate it. And, my father would have loved this.”

The Restoration
“When we first saw the boat, we didn’t necessarily think it was something we’d make look as good as the crew actually ended up making it look,” Phil Winger a Boat Building Instructor and Program Manager at UBI said. “Dave and I could have ruined this boat, but we relied on the volunteers that got involved to identify it as something of value.”

UBI welcomes volunteers from the community to help with projects. Many of the volunteers are skilled boat builders and restorers with deep knowledge of the field. It was a volunteer that used the boat’s serial number to trace it back to it manufacture in 1915.