Former curator disagrees with Adirondack Experience decision to auction 16 boats to private buyers
By James M. Odato
Blue Mountain Lake’s Adirondack museum pared its world-class boat collection recently by 16 vessels, prompting the former longtime curator to speak out against the sale.
The watercraft moved out include 19th-century vessels made in a preeminent boatbuilding shop from the history of the North Country.
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The Adirondack Experience museum tagged the small boats for deaccession, or removal, via a public auction.
To some boat experts, that was a mistake that weakens the museum’s status as a research center.
“The deaccessions suggest a superficial appreciation of the boat collection and its role in the museum’s importance and reputation,” said Hallie Bond, the museum’s curator from 1986 to 2012. The author of “Boats and Boating in the Adirondacks,” Bond possesses substantial expertise in historic small boats, according to peers.
After the auction was announced, she wrote on Aug. 5 to Adirondack Experience Executive Director David Kahn, 10 days before the sale.
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She outlined her concerns and laid out a boat-by-boat justification and defense for keeping the vessels. She focused on opposing the sale of 12 of the boats because of their significance in telling the stories of Adirondack boating history.
The boats, sold by Blanchard’s Auction Service in Potsdam, included some built by J. Henry Rushton, whose famed shop in Canton made prized vessels. Rushton’s designs were venerated for their high quality and variety. Also auctioned: a custom-built cruising canoe made by the W.F. Stevens shop in Lowell, Mass., also renowned for its craftsmanship and innovation.
The batch of vessels netted the museum less than $30,000 for its acquisition fund.
Blanchard’s listed the items in its “Premier Adirondack Auction,” which drew 1,150 registered bidders for many types of items, such as rustic furniture, framed paintings of wildlife, duck decoys and wooden snowshoes.
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Auctioneer Kip Blanchard said he visited the museum’s boat collection in Blue Mountain Lake, some 260 boats, and the auctioned items were redundant or needed restoration. Plus, he said, they had not been made or used in the Adirondacks.
He said the museum can’t keep everything it’s given and bear the expense of holding the old boats in climate-controlled storage. He believed a public sale, with transparency, was the best way forward.
Questioning the process
Bond’s letter to Kahn, the executive director, also asked whether the museum followed the boat collections policy established long ago of gifting an item no longer desired to another institution or returning it to the donor when possible.
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She received a reply from Kahn that did not address this question. He said the collection was surveyed by a boat expert, Benjamin A. Fuller, who has curated boat collections in museums in New England.
“A number of boats were subsequently judged to be out of scope and selected for deaccessioning,” Kahn said, according to the email. “We have similarly brought in outside experts to help us review other segments of the collection in recent years (e.g. wheeled vehicles and firearms). We have also refined those collecting areas by deaccessioning out of scope items. Proceeds from the sale of all deaccessioned items are used to strengthen the collection.”
A behind-the-scenes look at the special collections of Adirondack Experience, The Museum on Blue Mountain Lake, with Conservator & Collections Manager Doreen Alessi-Holmes. Explorer file video
When prevailing on Kahn to reconsider, Bond wrote a detailed explanation on why 12 boats shipped out had relevance in telling the Adirondack narrative.
For instance, the Rushton pleasure rowboat Eva built between 1873 and 1887 represented the earliest such craft and the only one with the Rushton name painted within it.
“Rushton’s designs came from Adirondack needs and the surrounding culture,” Bond wrote. “He grew up in the foothills of the Adirondacks and his boats were widely used here.” Eva sold for $4,200.
Also, the Rusthon Vesper model included a complete set of interlocking cockpit covers which are “absolutely unique,” Bond said. The boat, made between 1895 and 1900 in the Saint Lawrence County shop, fetched the highest sum at auction among the vessels from the museum collection, $8,750.
The Vesper was a survivor of the cruising canoe models meant to be sailing canoes, Bond said. The auction house listed it as a “rare and desirable boat, less than 10 known to exist.”
Bond said there is a difference between auction value and historic value. The museum, she said, has lost some of its ability to tell a fuller story of the connections among watercraft used in the Adirondacks that researchers can benefit from at what has been one of the greatest fresh-water boat collections anywhere.
New acquisitions for the museum
Tara Murphy, communications director for Adirondack Experience, said the museum follows industry standards, sensitivity and care in culling to ensure “the integrity of the collection” and to open space and create resources to add valuable new items.
The museum, she said, has added 25 boats to its collection in the past decade and in late August acquired a rare 1870s Adirondack guideboat built by Newcomb-based boat builder Caleb Chase. It was acquired from the Burley family’s shipyard in Essex.
The 19-footer, labeled Camp Pine Knot, is the earliest example of a large, freight-style guideboat in the collection and may be the earliest surviving example anywhere, Murphy said. It traces to the first of the Adirondack Great Camps built by William West Durant on Raquette Lake. It will be exhibited, she said.
Mourning the losses
Bond applauded the additions, but mourns the losses of boats she considers major assets.
The auction house quoted extensively from Bond’s book on boats in describing the vessels auctioned, including the 1888 sailing canoe, Wasp, made by the Stevens shop in Lowell for canoe designer and sailor Paul Butler.
In Wasp, Butler won the American Canoe Association championship sailing trophy at the encampment at Willsborough Point on Lake Champlain in 1892 and the International Challenge Cup in 1895 in New York City.
“She came to us from the museum at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” Hallie said about Wasp in her message to Kahn, “no doubt because of its importance as well as the importance of the (Adirondack) museum’s collection of sailing canoes.” The boat, with innovations such as clutch cleats, aluminum hardware and a spirally laminated mast, sold for $3,700.
“The ultimate tragedy to me is these boats are never going to be seen again,” Bond said.
Photo at top: Hallie Bond, who curated the museum’s boating exhibition and wrote a book on the history of boating in the Adirondacks, is a former museum staffer and current Long Lake historian. Explorer file photo by Mike Lynch
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