08/01/2022
The Derry museum owns one of seven surviving dugout canoes in New Hampshire. The 10-foot-long watercraft apparently made of the wood of the sweetgum tree, was 80 percent intact when it was raised from about 25 feet of water several hundred yards off Comeau’s Beach on Beaver Lake in August 1972. When the divers, Ernest and Roger Cote, were able to drag the waterlogged 200-pound canoe to Donald Mafera’s wharf and out of the water, everyone assumed it was an Native American artifact.
Stylistically, the Derry dugout, with its thick bow and stern construction and high sides curving slightly inward, resembles later other Euro-American specimens. Franklin Pierce College Professor Howard R. Sargent also concluded in 1972 that the presence of iron adze cut marks on one end of the deck clearly identified it as eighteenth or nineteenth century construction. If there was other evidence of a post-1719 Native American presence in Nutfield or Old Londonderry, it could be argued that the canoe makers had adopted European tools and technology. But it is more likely that the Beaver Lake dugout canoe belonged to Derry settlers who had adopted Native American forms. We hope to soon be able to conduct further research on the Beaver Lake canoe and consult with specialists to reach a firmer conclusion either way, as many advances have been made in archeology and anthropology over the last 40 years.
