Paper Boats Made Waters Famous

Paper Boats Made Waters Famous!

By Don Rittner

Paper is truly a remarkable invention! As early as 4,000 B.C, ancient Egyptians used Papyrus, a type of paper made from a woven mat of reeds and pounded into a hard thin sheet. Ancient Greeks used parchment that was made from animal skins. But paper as we know it today was invented in China in 105 AD. Historical records show that its invention was reported that year to the Chinese Emperor by Ts'ai Lun, an official of the Imperial Court. Although recent archeology has pushed the date back two hundred years, the fact is paper has been around for a very long time.

While we all use paper for communication (and occasionally making paper airplanes), there were many other uses put to the product when it was first introduced into America in the 18th century. Paper has been used for making clothes, train car wheels, observatory domes, coffins, and even boats! Yes, boats, and that of course brings us to Troy.

Eliza Waters, formerly a druggist and his son opened a factory at 303 River Street and began making paper boxes. According to historians that all changed when George Waters, the teen aged son of Eliza, was invited to a masquerade party in 1867. Instead of paying eight dollars for a mask, he borrowed the mask and made a paper replica of it using paper and paste from his father’s factory.

Impressed with his success, he attempted to fix a leaky cedar rowing shell that he picked up by varnishing and gluing paper to portions of the hull. It was this success that led him and his father in June of that year to build the world’s first paper boat. By using the hull of a wooden rowing shell as the mold, they glued stripes of paper in unbroken lengths from stem to stern and varnished them together. This first paper boat was christened "The Experiment."

Only one year after the first Waters paper boat was constructed, in 1868, paper racing hulls won 14 water races followed by 26 wins the following year, making quite a splash with the rowing public.

In 1871 Waters issued a four hundred plus page ‘Catalogue and Oarsman's Manual.’ By 1875, they were producing more than 45 different racing shells, row boats or canoes and the New York Daily Graphic declared that they had the largest boat factory in the United States. That same year, a Cornell crew rowing a paper six-ored boat, beat 10 other colleges in wooden boats at Saratoga Lake, and the following year, paper boats swept all events in the Centennial Regatta.

Waters paper boats were not only used for racing. Pleasure Canoes were also made and two people helped make the Waters name famous. A reporter, Julius J. Chambers, planned a trip from the headwaters of the Mississippi to its mouth in New Orleans. In May of 1872 he began his voyage at the White Earth Indian Reservation in central Minnesota with his paper boat. A month later he made it to Lake Itasca and explored the tributaries feeding the lake but terminated his trip just short of his final destination. He penned reports of the trip in the New York Herald.

Another adventurer, Nathaniel Holmes Bishop, began a trip from Quebec to the gulf coast of Florida in 1874 using a conventional wooden canoe. When he reached Troy in his ‘wooden’ canoe, he discovered the Waters paper boat factory, ordered one, and abandoned his wooden one AND his assistant. Liberated from both, he eventually made it south. He wrote a popular book of his exploits called the Voyage of the Paper Canoe detailing his trip, his paper boat, and it was quite a hit with the public.

Fast and light, Waters paper boats would become dominant for 30 years. However, the Waters family didn’t rest on their laurels. In 1878, they built a paper observatory dome 29 feet in diameter for the newly erected Proudfit Observatory at RPI. Using the same construction techniques that were used to make their boats, thick linen paper was placed over dome molds. The sixteen individually cast sections were then bolted together forming the two-ton observatory dome. It was removed 20 years later when the building was remodeled in 1889. They continued making domes around the country including one 30 foot in diameter for the U.S. Academy at West Point.

The paper boat industry literally was born and died with the founders. George and Eliza died in 1902 and 1904, shortly after George accidently burned their factory down in 1901.

Only three surviving Waters paper boats are known to survive. You don’t have to travel far to see one now on display at the Rensselaer County Historical Society.

The paper boat industry was a short lived industry but it is another example of the entrepreneurial spirit that was so pervasive during Troy’s industrial heyday!

Don is the author of Images of America: Troy and the soon to be released Images of America - Lansingburgh. Reach Don at drittner@aol.com.