Harvey Golden
More than 200 boats are on exhibit at the Canadian Canoe Museum’s new building in Peterborough, Ontario, including a wide variety of kayaks.
When people see that you have an old canoe, there is some unwritten rule in the universe that dictates that someone will soon offer you another. For Kirk Wipper, this first old canoe was a commercially built dugout, carved from basswood in the late 1800s by Payne Bros. of Warsaw, Ontario. A friend of Wipper’s gave it to him in 1959, and he displayed it at Camp Kandalore, a boys’ wilderness and canoe camp that he operated from 1957 to 1978. While he could not have known it at the time, this was the beginning of what is now the world’s largest collection of paddled watercraft: the Canadian Canoe Museum.