Old Craft, New Twist
*unless otherwise noted
John Henry Rushton was a trendsetter.
The Canton-based boatbuilder, who made top-of-the-line watercraft in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was egged on by his famous customer George Washington Sears, aka “Nessmuk,” to design smaller and smaller boats for the diminutive adventurer. When Nessmuk talked up his ultra-light canoes in regular columns for —including the pocket-size , weighing only 10.5 pounds—the fad caught on, though Rushton wasn’t entirely happy about it. “The trouble is, every damn fool who weighs less than 300 thinks he can use such a canoe too,” he wrote to Nessmuk in 1886. Great Camp pioneer William West Durant, who caught a glimpse of the as it was being built, was one of those eager to jump right in. But Rushton knew better, insisting Durant needed the dimensions of an older, slightly larger Nessmuk model. The result was a boat Durant called the , the gran-daddy of today’s pack canoes that’s on display at the Adirondack Experience, in Blue Mountain Lake. Now that pinnacle of old-time craftsmanship is serving as a model for the latest technology.
