W. 3 Returns to Canoe Heaven
With my long-time canoeing pals John and Dan, I had the extreme pleasure of returning a restored Thompson canoe (known affectionately as W. 3) to YMCA Camp Widjiwagan in late August. There are pictures of the canoe, before and after restoration, in the Canoes page of this site.

This is a long story but it ends well.
When Widjiwagan first opened in 1929 several Haskell (plywood) canoes were purchased but they did not hold up well to the rigors of wilderness canoe tripping. In the mid-1930s camp bought a couple of Thompson canoes (including this one) which were better suited for wilderness travel. Despite the fact that Thompson quality was as good as an Old Town canoe, in 1937 camp purchased ten seventeen-foot long Old Towns (numbering them W1 through W10). At the time, Old Towns were perceived by camp leaders to be more prestigious. In 1939, one of the Old Towns Town (serial number 119906) went over Curtain Falls (with no serious injuries to the campers who were in it at the time). The Old Town was destroyed.
These were hard-times financially and camp was unable to purchase another Old Town as a replacement. So this Thompson (it appears that it had been W. 12) was renumbered and moved into the W.3 slot.
Thus, the Wisconsin-made Thompson became the second Widjiwagan canoe to bear the W3 number. Technically, since this canoe was bought before any of the Old Towns, it should have been W.1 but that designation went to an Old Town canoe purchased in 1937.
The canoe was assigned to me in August 1970 for my first canoe trip as a counselor. It was old, scarred and heavy but it was mine for the trip. I overlooked the fact that I was a new counselor and had been given the worst of the wooden canoes in the floating fleet. I was proud and nervous and counted on that canoe to get me through. I was relieved when I got the five guys and W3 back to camp safely after our 8-day trip.
A couple of days later the W. 3 Thompson was sold to a former counselor and taken with him when he went to teach at Cornell in Ithaca. I did not realize that it was gone at the time. It wasn’t until 2016 that I noticed that a Seliga was in the W. 3 spot. What had happened to the Thompson?
Curious about the Thompson’s absence, and with her encouragement, my wife and I started a search that lasted nearly four years.
At the outset, I asked Gary, a former fellow staff, if he recalled the Thompson. “That old heavy beast?” was his response. Yes, he remembered it, but didn’t know until that conversation that it was gone. Finding the answer became important to me. Skip, another former staffer who remembered the canoe said “It was heavy. We sold it to so-and-so in 1970,” but he couldn’t recall who so-and-so-was.
Back in my era, canoe records were kept on recipe cards in a recipe box that sat on the Trail Director’s desk. By 2016, it had been years since anyone had used (or seen) that box. Someone couldn’t have thrown it away, could they? Living over two hundred miles from the camp, my visits were limited to one or two a year, but on my second trip I finally found the box on a shelf stacked with dust-covered canoe parts.
Going through the box, I found the card for Thompson W. 3. Its first entry was about fiberglassing its hull in 1953 (in fact, 1953 was the earliest repair note date for any of the old canoes). On the Thompson W.3 card were repair notes from 1957, 1960, 1961 and so on. Joe Seliga did a lot of the repairs on the Thompson. On the back was the last entry, a handwritten note “September 1970. Sold Thompson to counselor Jack H. bought Seliga in 1971.” W.3 had been replaced by a new Seliga. “Jack H.” I knew the name. He had been a counselor several years before me. I made contact with him, and he said that he had made a “contribution” to the camp in exchange for the canoe, which he took with him when he moved his family to Ithaca, New York. Eight years later, while preparing to relocate to Houston he sold the Thompson to an acquaintance. In 2017, Jack told me he thought the canoe was still in the Ithaca area, so I believed W.3 was in New York. Maybe.
My letter to the editor was published in the August 2017 issue of Wooden Canoe, and I used the Wooden Canoe Heritage Association Directory to contact 185 members in New York, requesting help with my search. I received many responses, and felt as if I had gained 185 new friends in New York. Responses included “Boy a long shot indeed;” “I’ve rebuilt a few canoes, but only Old Towns and a Kennebec,” and “I wouldn’t know a Thompson if it came up and bit me.”
Somehow these folks weren’t taking this as seriously as I was. One correspondent referred me to a canoe builder I was pretty sure had died two years earlier. Many people sent a list of the canoes they own, once owned or wished they owned. But it was the spirit of the responses that buoyed me. “I admire you in your search” wrote one respondent.
I periodically checked the Ithaca Craigslist site for Thompsons, and in August 2020 I saw a brown-painted canoe that appeared vaguely Thompson-like in the low-quality photos. I reached out again to Jack who said that he had never painted it, but he added that his daughter was still in contact with the daughter of the man who bought the canoe. He offered to check on it for me. I quickly forgot about the brown canoe, waited as patiently as possible, and two weeks later learned from Jack that the “old Thompson seems to be alive and well.” He said that it was in Ithaca, and he thought it had gone on the water over Labor Day weekend 2020. He gave me a name and a mailing address for the owner’s daughter.
I sent a letter and two weeks later received a call from a man named Dave, the man who bought the Thompson from Jack many years before. I hadn’t really expected to find the elusive needle in the haystack, and I hadn’t so much found the canoe as it had found me. Dave and I exchanged stories about canoeing and trout fishing, family outings, and the Thompson. He revealed that he was eighty-two years old and was in the process of downsizing. He expected to put his house on the market, and neither of his daughters were interested in the canoe so he had to find a new home for it. Was I interested in it?
Until that moment, our intention was simply to complete the narrative. We never considered that we would have the opportunity to bring the old Thompson “home.” But if we bought it, at least we would know where it was. So, we came to an agreement with Dave and arranged for New York-based KAS Transport to deliver the canoe 854 miles from Ithaca to our home in Minnesota. Dave sent pictures. The canoe looked good, great even, for a ninety-year-old canoe. Still, we expected some surprises, and that it would need some work before going out on-trail again.
In her book Inheriting A Canoe Paddle, author Misao Dean argues that for some people “the canoe is an object, it is a material object so the only meaning it has are meanings we attribute to it.” However, for many the wooden canoe is an endowed object, representing and embodying more than its parts and function. Indeed, Widjiwagan’s narrative speaks of the magic of canoes and the wilderness, and the gift of journey and increased self-awareness. The camp’s earliest canoes carried the weight of paddlers, trail equipment, and the fragile dream of what Widjiwagan could become. They made the pursuit and achievement of the wilderness camp dream possible.
On a Saturday at dusk on a wintry day in 2020, snow in the forecast, our search was over. The Thompson canoe, old W. 3, arrived at my home. She took my breath away.
In April 2021 Urban Boatbuilders opened up again. The crew of restoration volunteers was back doing restorations. They finished the restoration in early September 2022. All that was left was to bring it North.
On a Saturday afternoon, under a deep blue sky dotted with puffy clouds, sunshine and light breezes in the forecast, the search and waiting over. W. 3 was back at Widjiwagan, nestled in what Dave, the previous owner, called “canoe heaven.” Welcome home W. 3!