Around the turn of the century, famed Adirondack boat builder J. H. Rushton bragged his rowing boats were tough.
“With good care, they should last over 20 years,” he advertised.
He was right.
Last week, South Bristol small boat builders Dick Shew and Cecil Burnham put the finishing touches on one they restored for a client. It is about 110 years young.
The tiny 13-foot-long lapstrake rowing boat, its varnished Spanish cedar strip decking gleaming in the autumn afternoon sun, seems like a different craft than the dusty hulk discovered by builder Jim Mayshark under a Lake Chautauqua cottage.
“I found it 25 or 30 years ago when I was crawling under the cottage inspecting the foundation, said Mayshark.
“I asked the owner, a respected coach from Western Reserve University (in Cleveland, Ohio), what he wanted me to do with it. He said ‘get rid of it.’
“I told them I would like to have it, it was beat up, but kind of neat, and said what do you want for it? He sort of hemmed and hawed.
“I told him I would take $50 off his bill and he said, ‘Done,'” said Mayshark.
The builder, who has done much of the work on the cottages of the famed resort in Western New York, said he always planned to restore the boat himself but just never got around to it.
“It just sat for umpteen years, until Phil saw it.”
Phil, is Philip Mallard, a friend from Hiram College, who was visiting Mayshark.
“My friend James has a home on the lake that he rebuilt himself. There is an old barn and small shed workshop. I saw this hulk sitting in the middle of his workshop and it looked like a piece of dung.
“But, I could see it had great lines. I made a few calls and got the Adirondack Museum, at Blue Lake Mountain, N.Y, and described it to an expert.
“I told him it was a lapstrake boat made with half rounds ribs, and he said it is a Rushton.
“I said it looks like an Adirondack guide boat and he said, ‘You are not listening, it is a Rushton.'”
“They were built so well they tend to survive,” the man said.
Hallie E. Bond, the curator of the boat collection at the Adirondack museum explained the lure of the Rushtons. The museum boasts 39 Rushtons in its collection.
“They are just beautiful,” she said explaining they were built to be lightweight, and easy to row or paddle, but strong enough to last.
In the late 1800s, J.H. Rushton had a factory at Canton, N.Y., where his canoes, sailing canoes and rowing boats were prized as lightweight pleasure boats for the folks who vacationed in the huge mountain wilderness park.
After learning its heritage, Mallard volunteered to restore it for his college friend. The first thing he did was to contact Shew & Burnham.
“Several years ago, Mallard wanted to find one of our Whitehall skiffs. We found one for him and he seemed pleased,’ said Burnham.
In 2005, Mallard brought the Rushton to South Bristol.
It took four years for the South Bristol craftsmen to get around to finishing the gem, but you don’t hurry Cecil Burnham and Dick Shew.
It just isn’t done. They do exquisite work, but they do work at their own pace.
Last week, the two craftsmen took time to show the prize to a friend. As a Mozart string quartet blared from a radio covered in sawdust, Burnham described the project.
“We had made several Adirondack guide boats and have visited the Blue Lake Museum. We were familiar with Rushtons. They are light, but are so well built they tend to survive,” he said.
“She had a hole in her bow, all the ribs needed replacing, the decking was in trouble, one of the seats was gone. The oarlocks were cabbaged on to the rails and held in place with stove bolts. She was old and tired,” Burnham said.
“She was a mess.”
The first task was to replace 63 frames, the half inch wide, half round ribs. Mallard had a source for them and he sent them to Burnham. The South Bristol craftsman took them outside and dunked them in a pond.
“I took them to the (nearby) pond and sunk them under water for four or five days. Then I brought them to the shop and put them in the steam box,” Burnham said.
“You can bend them, but the easiest way was to build a series of jigs to fit the inside of the boat. I bent them around the jig, then I tacked the rib to the keel and fitted them to the sides,” he said.
“After they are steamed, you can not bend them more, but you can loosen them a bit. And that is what we did. Tacking them to the keel, then to one side and fit the other to the other side,” he said.
Burnham stayed true to the original materials and tacked the 63 ribs to the side using 1200 copper tacks.
The craftsman then replaced the sheer strake, the guardrail and the inwhale and fashioned new oak seats. There was a hole in the bow so he had to replace part of the stems and several planks.
Then came new decks, tiny strips of Spanish cedar tightly packed together just like Rushton’s men did.
The craft originally had a rudder, but this one was AWOL.
“We got a plan for the rudder from the Adirondack Museum and made one out of mahogany,” he said.
Burnham said the craft still had the original rudder brackets called gudgeons and they were reused, as were the brass seat brackets.
The final chore involved coating the outside with paint, varnishing the new decking and rails and coating the inside with linseed oil.
Now that she is restored, where she will live is up in the air.
Mallard says he wants to give it back to Mayshark.
Mayshark says Mallard has done so much work on it that it rightfully belongs to him.
Meanwhile, Dick Shew and Cecil Burnham carried the tiny boat out of their workshop and carefully placed it in a storage shed for the winter.
It will sit there in the shed under the towering oak trees not far from the South Bristol harbor until someone decides where it will reside for the next 110-years.
