For well over a century, the Adirondack guideboat served the guides and "sports" of the Adirondack region of upstate New York. As Ben Fuller notes in his article on the type beginning on page 40, "[b]eginning in the 1850s, tourists, typically affluent vacationers who could afford both the cost and the time needed for sojourns into the mountains, increasingly sought refuge from the summer heat of cities such as New York, Boston, Cleveland, and Cincinnati." The early visitors, he says, were men attracted by fishing and hunting, and for these pursuits they needed boats. Thus was born the Adirondack guideboat, which, as you'll read, was initially a transom-sterned boat but by the late 19th century had "developed to be very light for easy portages from lake to lake, with a yoke fitting the shoulders of the guide." The boats rowed easily, carried a load of gear, and were beautiful. Their construction was elegant and sophisticated: the planking was lapstrake, but it presented on the surface as a smooth-skinned boat so the hulls would move through the water quietly.
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