Based on an Interview with Daniel Francis, September 20, 1979
KAWARTHA LAKES-Ted Gordon grew up in a boat building family. Some people would say that his grandfather, Thomas Gordon (1833-1916) invented the cedar strip canoe (others credit Peterborough’s John Stephenson). Whether or not he was the first, in Lakefield, the Gordon family became known for boat building, in an era when boats were made locally, from wood. When Thomas went into business, many waterfront residents owned a canoe, and in summer this was often the fastest way to get from Point A to B. Cedar strip canoes allowed for tougher, longer-lasting designs that traditional birch bark. Imagine trying to find a birch tree large enough to make a canoe.
Though Ted was born in Vancouver, and was just two years old when his grandfather passed away, he could remember visiting the Lakefield manufactory, which was located on the main street, near the wharf: “It was in my recollection, a big square building about I would say 100 feet square. Not a tremendous building but big enough for a little town like Lakefield.”
For its time, before the advent of electricity, the Lakefield Canoe Company was well equipped. The machinery to process the rough sawn cedar lumber was located on the first floor. By the time Ted saw it as a boy, the Lakefield factory had a planer, a rip saw, thickness planer and a band saw. Because there were no electric tools, instead of using a drill, the workers made holes every two inches on the hull with a piercer. They used a saw to machine the tongue and groove edges of the cedar strips that were then fit together. Three or four men processed the material downstairs in the factory, before it was moved upstairs for assembly.
The boats were assembled on a mould. One man ribbed the boat. To bend the ribs “they had a big pot with a fire box under it and then full of water and you’d put the ribs in there and boiled them. Now, they call that a steam box, but it was actually a boiling box. It boiled the sap out of them and made them soft and they bent very easily.” When high quality ribs were fitted, perhaps only one rib would break in making a boat.” The hull was then left overnight, “and then they’d dress them down smooth and then they’d move up to the planker, the man who puts the skin on, cuts them off and takes them off the mould.” A basswood canoe was made up of three boards on each side: “the bottom boards are sixteen feet long and twelve inches and a quarter wide and they have to be clear…. The top board was shorter. It was about eight inches deep. The gunwhales went on it.” A cedar strip canoe incorporated much narrower lumber—sixteen or eighteen pieces on each side.
Once the skin was on the boat, another worker put the keels and stem on the boat—these parts had to be smoothed so they would fit. The finisher would clinch (bend over) all the nails that projected through after the assembly. “On an outboard or a bigger boat, you needed someone inside, because you couldn’t reach. Then they put the gunwhales on, the thwarts in, decks on and I believe there they had someone that cleaned off the canoe… after it was all built and clinched,” the planking was rough, so a worker would take a hand plane to dress “all the excess off. It was all done by hand then. They didn’t have electric sanders.”
Once the assembly was complete, the boat went into a finishing room. Cedar strip boats received a coat of boiled linseed oil, before varnishing. Basswood canoes (a more economical option) were treated with a gallon of hot, boiled linseed oil, cut with a little turpentine, which was put on the “inside of it and sloshed around and all of it would disappear. So that’s what made the basswood canoe last.” Basswood absorbed much more oil than cedar “it just sucked it up like a sponge.” After being oiled, the basswood canoes were painted. Once the finish had cured, the boats were ready to ship to customers.
Ted travelled around the area to source the wood for his boats. “We’d talk to the farmers you know and most of them knew what you’d require. Well maybe we’d have to go to ten places to get enough for a dozen canoes, but each one would throw out the real good logs that would make it, you see. And we’d pay them a premium. Like I went over there, across in Lakehurst, the last stuff I bought and they had cut over a thousand acres of wood that winter. They had a skidway of basswood from here to the Island, ten feet high and out of that I got enough stuff for six canoes. I was just over there when they were loading it on their own trucks to get it to the mill and if we came to a good log we’d throw it out.” Ted was looking to make lumber that was clear, with no knots, and no twisted grain—especially with basswood.
“When my grandfather first built the boats, he figured the wood should sit up in the drying shed for three or four years, preferably four years before it was touched. At that time, the wood they cut now, they wouldn’t use until next year. They kept a stockpile ahead. They let it air dry. Kiln drying is no good and of course in those days they didn’t have kilns anyway. But air dry and then it would be ripped, put in the shop and stacked with crossers to make sure that before they used it, it was dry. Because if you didn’t, you had a helluva mess that’s all.”
“They built five canoes, five different models. They were built so that one went inside the other, and the outside one was the crate, and it was a bigger canoe, rough.” Thomas Gordon shipped canoes to England, “and the outside canoe was sold to prospectors and that mostly in Africa as a freight canoe…. Twenty-five dollars was a good price for a canoe.”
Ted recalled that the Lakefield factory lasted until about 1922 or 1924, then “I guess it just petered out. In the early 1920s, “they started putting out an outboard motor that was reasonably reliable,” made by Johnson or Evinrude. In 1922, Johnson Outboard Motors of Waukegon, Illinois introduced a new design, then six years later purchased a factory in Peterborough that became the Canadian Johnson Motor Company Ltd. This new generation of outboards were the first that you could “expect them to run. Now they weren’t too sophisticated, but they ran. And that seemed to kill the demand for canoes, except, to the local trapper and he mostly sufficed on second-hand stuff.” At Lakefield, “they had good mechanics” who worked until they were 65 or 70,” then when the business manager died, the Lakefield location “was just sold because there was nobody to carry it on.”
At Bobcaygeon, Dr. S.H. (Stephen) Thorne set up a medical practice in 1888 as a 25-year-old doctor. He loved boating, and built a dock in near his residence on Helen Street. In 1894, he converted his boathouse into a workshop and recruited Thomas Gordon’s sons, Gilbert (Gib) and Charles Gordon to come to Bobcaygeon. During the First World War, Gib moved to Oshawa “to work for General Motors” where he built crates. After the conflict, he wanted to continue as a builder, “so he and Dad made a deal and Dad took this one over.”
When Charles took over the business, “we had more of a rental business at that time than we did a building business, but we built what we rented and we sold a few.” Charles called the company “Gordon Boat Works”—it has always been in the same location, known today as Gordon Yacht Harbour. “My dad got sick when I was eighteen and I took over. Well, somebody had to run it.”
When Ted started managing the business in 1932, the most common vessel that his company produced was a fifteen-foot boat that was designed for an outboard motor. It was about 5 feet wide and “fairly round on the bottom. “I can remember a tremendous event when we sold the fellow down the river a six horsepower Johnson and it weighed just as much as a twenty horsepower does today, or twenty-five. They were built primarily to take a 2 ½ to 3 horsepower outboard motor, a little twin, for fishing.” In the era when motors were not as reliable as they are today, having a second motor would allow the boater to limp back to shore when one quit. It was not a fast boat by modern standards. Ted would sell “eight or ten a year and we put three or four into rentals.” He also made six or eight canoes a year.
Ted had moulds to make four different sizes of canoes: 15-foot (which was popular with trappers); 15 ½-foot (“an in between canoe, the duck shooters used to like that for the marsh); 16-foot; and 17-foot, which was the least common “I can remember building one boat off her.” In the 1930s, the 15-foot boat sold for $105, cedar strip canoes were $65 and basswood canoes $45. Ted thought of the cedar canoe as the “deluxe” canoe and the basswood as the “standard” model.
Wooden canoes required maintenance, and they had a lifespan. “A cedar strip canoe, given reasonable care—and that’s not leaving it sit with water in it half the time—should be good for twenty years. I know several right now that are closer to forty years old, but on the other hand, we had a trapper and he bought a basswood canoe… he bought four basswood canoes… one in each year and he complained bitterly that they were rotten, but he’d come back and buy another one. So, I happened to be down his way in the summer and I went over to have a look at the canoe and it was sitting in the marsh, in the bog, with about that much water in it and it had turned green and had whiskers on it, that long. Well of course when he picked it out in the fall the bottom stayed in the lake, but this is what he did.”
“There was a lot of work to keep the rentals up in wood. You know, you had to be fixing them up all the time. That’s what dad was doing and we kept one boat builder, himself and then what us kids could do. His boat builder was Earl Hearn, who had worked in Lakefield before moving to Bobcaygeon, where he worked from about 1934 or 1935 until 1950.
Though the most common boat was a fifteen foot outboard, Gordon Boat Works made some larger vessels when there was demand, including a 38-foot twin diesel cruiser in 1934, a 32-foot twin-propeller runabout in 1938, a beautiful 25-foot all mahogany runabout with a Buick motor for a Stony Lake customer, and several 18 foot runabouts with a 4 cylinder Buchanan motor that sold for less than a thousand dollars—which was a luxury that many families could not afford during the Great Depression.
Ted made his boats from local wood and it could be challenging to source enough good cedar. “It kept us busy finding enough of that really for what we wanted.” As his grandfather had done, he made cedar strip and basswood canoes, but the boats were “all cedar strip.” In the 1940s, seven or eight men worked at Gordon Boat Works, including Ted, his two brothers (Ralph and Jack), his father, uncle Gib, Bill White and Ed Grant. Other than about two months in winter, they were kept busy year round.
“The market was strictly local,” as cottages were being built around the lake. “If they got a cottage, they just wanted a boat.” Occasionally, Ted sold a boat as far away as Toronto, but there was no wholesale. As the years passed, he began selling to his customers’ children. “The father’d have a boat…. And when the son got married, he wanted a boat. It was that way.”
By the 1930s, the available equipment was evolving. “We had electric drills which we used in place of hand tools. Like you could buy a little portable electric shaper like this to make the planking much more efficient, much faster and electric sanders. We didn’t use electric sanders too much until after the war, but then we used them for cleaning off boats.” After the Second World War, when electric sanders became common, it “cut the time [to smooth a boat] way down. I mean, you could do the boat in an hour with a machine, whereas by hand you would spend a whole day on a boat. But then too, naturally, the rate of pay went up a little bit.”
Other than the introduction of electric tools, the techniques used to manufacture canoes were little changed from his grandfather’s era. “As long as I can remember, we used the same design. Uncle Gib and dad built it, I suppose around 1910 or so, off very close to the one they’d been building at Lakefield. They found it very practical… a mould would last an awful long time. If it got too many nail hoes in it you took a piece out of it and repaired it.”
Ted started managing the business as the Great Depression was impacting businesses around Bobcaygeon. The infamous Wall Street stock market crash occurred in 1929, but “it didn’t hit here ‘till about 1931 or 32.” Previously, the company had 50 to 60 boats that they rented, but with the economic downturn, fewer visitors came to Bobcaygeon. “In 1932, we had about twenty boats in the water, the rest of them were piled up because there was no business.”
During the Great Depression, people worried about whether they would have a job and how they could make ends meet. “Our men would work seven days a week, or anything you asked them… because they knew that maybe tomorrow there wouldn’t be any more work for the summer and they got good pay. There were getting about forty cents an hour. In 1934, we were selling our labour for a dollar an hour, retail.”
During the 1930s, Gordon Boat Works was not manufacturing as many vessels. “The men were certainly willing to work because they needed it. There was no relief… see. I mean there was relief, but there was no Unemployment Insurance, so you didn’t have that frustration of people saying ‘oh the hell with it, I won’t work.’ And there were a few motor boats and a few cruisers and they broke down and if you had a thirty-foot cruiser with a shaft and propeller out of it, it was a big job. I mean you didn’t have the equipment. It was hard slugging work to get it out to fix it and still they were up here and their home port was likely in Toronto or Georgian Bay so it had to be fixed. In know in ’34 we built a way out of the end of the shop and put a steel carriage on it on wheels so we could launch this big cruiser and then we had the only place for miles where you could get a boat pulled out.”
In the 1930s, many tasks took much longer than they do today. Ted remembered “pulling out a twenty-five foot motor boat on a carriage, with a team of horses and it literally took two men, plus the horses and teamster, most of the day to get that boat out and shore it up and put away. Now, down here, with a set on chains on it, one man can do it in fifteen minutes.”
When the Second World War broke out, life changed once again. “You just locked the doors. In September, there was nothing. I was at the Toronto Exhibition putting on a water ski show and when we came home, it was just like coming home to… there was no business at all.” Before long he started getting contracts for military procurement. It began with a tender to construct gigs for minesweepers, which were small rowboats used for transport between ship and shore. “We built the four of them and everything froze up. This was about the end of November that we had them finished and they were supposed to come to test them. Well, they finally came after Christmas, between Christmas and New Year’s. I can remember hauling those boats up with a team or horses up the ways and that much ice on the bottom of them sitting in the water and we got them tested, but then they wouldn’t take delivery of them. Of course we raised hell, but it didn’t do any good.” Come spring, they received a contract for eight or ten boats. They were building “pretty near one boat a week.”
Once Gordon Boat Works was “rolling them out pretty good,” the contracts for gigs suddenly stopped. Then the navy “sent us an order to build eight-foot dinks [small boats like a dinghy] for Fairmiles [wooden anti-submarine patrol boats for the Royal Canadian Navy]. “They send us a hold order, we got the order for it and before we started, they send us a hold order, thank God. These were terrible things to build and we sat around.” Ted took a job working in Toronto on minesweepers for Taylors. When he returned to Bobcaygeon, they were building 25-foot pulling boats that sailors used to train and whalers, which were the standard lifeboat in the navy.
“The whalers were 27 feet long, about a 7-foot beam and it’s got a front deck made of grating, you know that’s open mesh and the stern… what they call the sheets raised up where the coxswain stands, and oh, we’d make the oars for it and the rudders and it had sails, big heavy canvas sails, short stubby mast but heavy.” Though Gordon Boat works did not make the sails, they had to supply them.
Ted’s brothers had served overseas during the Second World War, “Ralph was in Burma and Jack in Northern Ireland.” When they married and returned to Bobcaygeon, Ted and his brothers decided to build boats together. But Ralph and Jack soon reenlisted. “We built another building, which is Bill’s shop now, the long one, and we started building boats for the T. Eaton Company, outboards and we built them for two years… We built them for as long as they wanted boats and were willing to take a boat to your specifications. But the third year… they came in and they ordered five hundred boats, six hundred boats and they wanted so many this way and so many that way and they were in the driver’s seat. I told them to go ahead and build them if they wanted, but we didn’t. … That was the end of boat building.”
Up to the Second World War, the boats manufactured at Gordon Boat Works were similar to those that Ted’s grandfather had made at the Lakefield Canoe Company. By the 1950s, new materials were becoming common that had many advantages over traditional wood construction. “The fiberglass is a far better boat because they can do anything they like with it. I mean they can leave it half full of water for a month. They can prop it up on the snow all winter. They don’t have to look after it.” Fiberglass canoes had a much rounder bottom, which “makes them quick.” Gordon’s old wooden canoes were designed to be flat, and many trappers had put runners on them to slide wooden canoes across the ice. By the 1950s, canoes were no longer designed with the local trapper in mind.
In the 1950s, plywood became the common material for those still building wooden boats: “There was dozens of builders that built plywood boats out of anything they could get their hands on. At first there was a lot of plywood built to Air and Navy specifications, or Air Force specifications and it was really good.”
In 1952, Ted decided to sell the family business, as the market for cedar strip and basswood boats was disappearing. “We did not build anything in fiberglass” or canvas. Having used the same boat moulds for generations, by the 1950s Ted couldn’t imagine building another wooden boat with them. “I left the moulds and patterns and everything here. I didn’t have any place to put them and he didn’t particularly want them, but I didn’t either at that time and he just threw them outside where he was filling in and buried them with truck loads of gravel. They are gone.”
Ted was not yet done working with boats. “I was out of it for ten years, and then my brother and some other fellows were going to start Midway [Marina in Bobcaygeon] and I got mixed up with that and we built several houseboats, two or three cruisers and we had runabouts out in our backyard. Gordon Boat Works “took on an agency for fiberglass and so did everybody else… buy them and quit building them.” With the end of manufacturing, “there’s nothing to do in the wintertime. We used to fix boats you know, if you had a bad one, you’d put it aside and then do it in the winter.”
By 1979, Ted was working for Duffus Marine. That year an old mahogany boat came in to be repaired, “it had been let go and was all blistered. I took everything off and sanded it right down to the bare mahogany, filled it and put on five coats of varnish. It looks good when it’s finished, but when you all get the bill, you nearly faint.” It is much less work to winterize a fiberglass boat. Ted figured ten hours was enough time to clean and wax a fiberglass boat so that it looks like new. Ted kept working, but instead of building boats, he made swim ladders and platforms for cruisers.
Earl Gordon bought Gordon Boat Works, and subsequently passed it to Bill and Mary Jane. They renamed it Gordon Yacht Harbour to reflect the changing times. Colin Fernall purchased the business in 1975, and began a major reconstruction project in 1990, that was completed by its next owner, Charles Pitcher in 1999. Carlo and Angel Allegri purchased Gordon Yacht Harbour in 2024. It’s a very different business than it was a generation or two earlier, as covered slips now line the water, filled with boats manufactured in much larger factories, much further from home. The days when boats were made in the Kawarthas, with outboard motors from Peterborough and a testing facility at Gannon’s Narrows are becoming a distant memory, as more people than ever before enjoy summers by the lakes.
This story is a memory and nobody’s memory is perfect. Sometimes details get a little mixed up, things get forgotten or overlooked, and the perspective is inevitably subjective. If you notice something that not right, have something you would like to tell us, or a memory to share the museum would be happy to hear from you: [email protected]
This story is part of our partnership with Maryboro Lodge, The Fenelon Falls Museum and was written by Glenn Walker.
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