Museum digitizing renowned Adirondack guideboat collection

By Zachary Matson 

The Adirondack guideboat reflects its makers and the landscape it was built to navigate.

Enthusiasts are still working out the details of technique and the lineage of builders, many of whom produced boats still in use 125 years after they were custom-crafted for a specific lake or section of river. 

A project to digitize the world’s largest guideboat collection may shed new light on key questions: How and why did the guideboat evolve? How did the styles of builders differ? Did geography influence design? Can unknown builders be identified?

The Adirondack Experience’s boat collection, which includes around 85 guideboats plus archives, have expanded and sustained the collective understanding of the Adirondack guideboat. 

The museum now plans to create 3-D scans of its guideboats, using a method known as photogrammetry to convert hundreds of pictures into digital facsimiles.

Emerging from the Adirondack Park’s forests, lakes and waterways, the boats share distinctive traits: sleek lines, strong-yet-lightweight frames and maneuverability. Those sleek lines have long fascinated small boat enthusiasts, Great Camp owners and paddlers who marvel at the crafts’ ability to cut through choppy waters. 

Uniquely Adirondack, they originated in the stove-heated winter workshops of guides and skilled builders across the region. What may have started as a deviation of the battle-worthy bateau used on Lake Champlain, the guideboat evolved into a smooth, refined vessel through a rapid procession of design changes meant to eliminate every ounce of unnecessary wood. 

An expansion of the production of fine tacks following the Civil War and a surge in demand from tourists fueled the boat’s development. 

Spruce roots dried for years and cut from their natural curves became the boat’s strong, light ribs. Planks beveled to meet perfectly, and a narrow base board lessened the weight. 

Guideboats have been central to the Adirondack Experience since it opened as the Adirondack Museum in 1957. Within a year, the museum put on a guideboat exhibit. In summer 1959, small boat historian John Gardner visited the museum in Blue Mountain Lake to document the special boat style. 

With careful measurements and weeks of work, he meticulously recreated the dimensions of Virginia, a boat built in 1905 by Lewis Grant of Boonville for a great camp owner’s son, a University of Virginia alum.

The first boat in the museum’s collection with a known builder, Virginia became the first guideboat to ever have its lines recreated, providing a roadmap to hobbyist builders. The boat, painted in the university’s distinctive orange and blue, rests on the top shelf of the museum’s central boat exhibit. 

In December, David and Katherine Cockey, working with museum staff, took down Virginia, placed it on a dolly in the guideboat exhibition room and methodically collected snapshots of every detail. They photographed the boat from hundreds of angles, slowly sliding a camera around it, before flipping it over and continuing to record its underside.

On a nearby laptop, engineer and consultant David Cockey uploaded the photos into special software. In minutes, a digital model took shape, processing and stitching together common points within the photos. Photogrammetry, a term coined in the 1860s, is about as old as the guideboat. 

The technology promptly processes huge amounts of detail.

“Eleven years ago, what I can do in 10 minutes with this software took an hour,” Cockey said. “What I can do in an hour took 10 hours.” 

What took Gardner days can now be replicated almost at once and scaled to scores of boats—potentially enabling a resurgence of understanding the boat’s design intricacies. 

David and Katherine Cockey and Ben Fuller, who live near Rockport on the Maine coast and are working with Adirondack Experience, completed a similar project on Maine peapods, small wooden boats traditionally used for near-shore lobstering and accessing remote lighthouses. 

Photogrammetry opens the door to countless research, preservation and educational opportunities. Boat builders will have blueprints to scores of potential new designs, students can interact with guideboats in a new way and researchers can plot how the boat changed over time and attempt to fill in the gaps of unknown builders. 

The models also reveal fine details that might otherwise go overlooked. Katherine Cockey said after viewing a scan of a boat, she noticed a small nail hole she hadn’t seen in person. She called the museum that owned the boat to check; sure enough, there was the nail hole.

“It helps you open up your mind,” Katherine Cockey said of the digital models. “You start to see things you may not have seen when you are looking at the boat.”

Scanning shipwrecks

It’s especially hard to see things in the murky waters of Lake Champlain, where a trove of historic shipwrecks remains preserved in the cold depths.

The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vermont, started experimenting with photogrammetry in 2014, working with Texas A&M researchers to document steamboat shipwrecks in Shelburne Bay.

They used the technique to record a ferry in Burlington Bay and sunken canal boats. During the summer of 2022, the museum photographed the gunboat Spitfire, the last remaining intact Revolutionary War vessel.

Over four days, the team took 30,000 still photos from a special-use underwater drone, a challenge in the lake’s deep, dark waters. Once the photographs were uploaded into the software that stitches the photos into a three-dimensional representation, it took six days of continuous computing to process the data and several weeks to finalize a model. 

The researchers are able to compare boats made at the same time and place and find differences, said Chris Sabick, executive director of the maritime museum. “That leads to the question: why?”

Sabick said photogrammetry is a powerful tool for cultural historians who work with artifacts, especially large ones. The technique can even be used to record an entire site, such as a homestead or area of environmental concern. 

Imagine if structures, including some of architectural importance, destroyed after state acquisition had first been modeled with photogrammetry. Researchers and interested residents could refer to the historic buildings and learn from their architecture and construction. 

The models can also be printed into physical replicas using 3-D printers.

Sabick intends to continue documenting the underwater sites in Lake Champlain, returning over time to see how the sites change. The museum has attempted, unsuccessfully so far, to use data from underwater dive videos from the 1980s and 1990s to create models from that period. If they were able to do so, Sabick said, they could see how invasive species like zebra mussels have altered the scene.

The data also deepens a museum’s archival reach and enables researchers to access data on a boat’s design and style remotely. 

The maritime museum has an interactive 3-D model of Spitfire available on its website allowing viewers to zoom in on the bow gun or the towering mast that was likely nicked by a downrigger trolling for fish in the lake. The 3-D model will help the museum plot its next steps in archaeological research at the site, providing insight into areas that may be worth excavating or exploring in more detail.

With its extensive collection of guideboats from different builders over many years, the Adirondack Experience is well positioned to capitalize on such technology, Sabick said.

“You can do some really interesting analysis,” he said. 

Learning from guideboats

“You have a hell of a collection here,” said Ben Fuller, who for years has been involved with historic boat preservation and education, as he walked around the Adirondack Experience boating exhibition. “The guideboats are about as light as you can build in wood.”

Fuller said he is interested in examining subtle differences in design driven by geographic differences. What adaptations to the style did the winding waters of the Saranac Lake area or the windy conditions on Long Lake necessitate? 

Those differences will be more obvious when the scans can be compared using specialized boat design software. The software can also model how a boat performs in different water conditions. 

“We don’t know, but that’s the kind of stuff we could learn,” Fuller said. 

The Cockeys and Fuller plan to return to Blue Mountain Lake every few months to document more of the guideboats. The museum is also training staff in the process and hopes to expand use of the technique to other items in its extensive collection. Already, they are eyeing a similar project for the museum’s lightweight pack canoes. 

“I haven’t even thought of all the potential things we can do,” said Doreen Alessi-Holmes, the museum’s collections manager. “We have the largest guideboat collection in the world, and we are trying to get one from every builder.” 

The museum allows the public to row some of the antique guideboats on Minnow Pond. The knowledge they have of how those boats handle on the water could inform what they learn about designs from the scanning project. Researchers can try to piece together the different ways the boats were used. 

While touring the Adirondack Experience off-site storage center, Hallie Bond, who curated the museum’s boating exhibit and wrote a history of boating in the Adirondacks, stood beside tall racks with boats stacked four high. 

“All of the boats here have to be light,” Bond said. “In the case of the guideboat, the prime consideration is to be able to put it on your shoulders and march for several miles. The guideboat is really a supreme example of lightweight boat construction—of all wooden boat construction, anywhere.” 

She reflected on how quickly the design form took shape in the mid-to-late-1800s and looked forward to what more the guideboats can teach us.

“They initially sort of look the same, but if you start to study them, then you see the differences,” Bond said. “It’s kind of magical. Within a lifetime, 40 years or so, Adirondackers came up with this.”

But while the guideboat’s functionality diminished as other boat styles became more practical and popular, photogrammetry’s uses have grown exponentially in the digital era.

Top photo: Doreen Alessi-Holmes, Adirondack Experience’s conservator and collections manager, leads a tour through the museum’s storage facility. Photo by Mike Lynch