ANTIQUE BOAT MUSEUM CELEBRATES 40 YEARS
Preserving and Exhibiting Great American Pleasure Boats

2004 marks the 40th anniversary of the oldest antique boat show in the United States, and of the Museum that it helped create. Nestled on the shoreline of the mighty St. Lawrence River in the picturesque village of Clayton, New York, the Antique Boat Museum has grown from a gathering of friends who loved old boats to an internationally-acclaimed cultural institution with an outstanding collection of more than 200 recreational boats, together with complementary fine art, nautical artifacts and archival materials.
 

(Left) In the Launch Building, see an outstanding collection of great American pleasure boats. Photo: : Kerun Ip

The Museum’s remarkable growth over the last four decades parallels that of the ACBS and of the sport which means so much to all of us. With the encouragement and support of the Museum and the ACBS and the unstinting efforts of their members, wooden pleasure boats have gone from being an endangered species to a thriving and vital part of the boating scene.
 

In the last decade, the Museum has steadily improved its campus and infrastructure and last year a long-standing dream was realized when the Elizabeth and Bolling Haxall Library and Exhibition Building opened. Completed after a multi-year project that also saw the reconstruction of the entire block of Mary Street which runs through the Museum’s campus, the Haxall Building contains exhibit galleries, a gift shop, the Lou Smith Library, the Marion Clayton Link Archives, artifact storage, offices and public program space. This magnificent building was designed by Grater Architects, PLC. Clad in shingles and clapboards, topped with a standing-seam metal roof and adorned with richly-detailed woodwork, the building harks back to the great age of resort architecture in the 1000 Islands region in the late nineteenth century.
 

(Right) In the Haxall Building Gallery, Exhibits celebrate the life, boats and culture of the St. Lawrence River.
Photo: : Kerun Ip

The new facilities offer researchers and staff much greater access to the Museum’s unsurpassed collections of art, artifacts, photographs and archival materials. Library and research facilities are now open year round, and staff and volunteers are hard at work cataloguing collections and preparing for the digitization of the extensive holdings of historic boating photographs.

The Antique Boat Museum has long been known for its boat collections and for impressing visitors with a sea of varnished mahogany and gleaming chrome. The galleries in the Haxall Building feature new exhibits that surround the boats with a rich cultural and historical context, such as “Glimpses of St. Lawrence Summer Life: Souvenirs from the Robert and Prudence Matthews Collection.” This displays a private collection thirty years in the making and explores the first great age of 1000 Islands tourism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. Other exhibits orient visitors to the River and its more than 1000 islands and show off new acquisitions to the permanent collections; a multi-media theater presents both archival film footage and new productions.
 

2004 is also the 100th anniversary of the legendary Gold Cup races. The first Gold Cup race took place in New York, NY, and was won by Standard at the then-remarkable speed of 23.6 mph. From 1905 to 1908, the races were held in Chippewa Bay, NY, and from 1909 to 1913 in Alexandria Bay, NY, both a short distance downriver from Clayton. The Museum’s collection of Gold Cup boats includes the elegant Dixie II (1908); Miss Detroit VII (1924); Baby Watercar (1926); Californian (1930); Miss Canada III (1938) and Something Else (1982), together with racing engines by Packard, Rolls-Royce and Falconer. The Antique Boat Museum will host the official 100th Anniversary celebration of the American Power Boat Association Gold Cup Vintage Race at its 7th biennial Antique Raceboat Regatta August 20th to 22nd, 2004, and open a new exhibit celebrating 100 years of Gold Cup racing.
 

The 2004 season is full of exciting events at the Antique Boat Museum, from the thunder of Raceboat Regatta to enjoyable favorites for the whole family such as the Festival of Oar, Paddle and Sail on July 17th and 18th. And of course, the show that began it all, the Antique Boat Show and Auction, runs from August 6th to 8th this year. We’ll see you on the River!