Two Summer Residents Thought Their Corner of Lake Huron Had More Old Wooden Boats Than Anywhere. In 1978 They Set Out to Prove It.

The theory was that the cold had been preserving them.

Chuck Letts and Ken Horsburgh both summered in the Les Cheneaux Islands and both owned old wooden boats, and somewhere in the 1970s they worked out why they kept seeing so many others. Lake Huron up here is cold and the season is short. A mahogany runabout that would have rotted out in forty years somewhere warmer had been spending nine months a year in a boathouse, out of the sun, in a climate that does not encourage anything to break down quickly. Their guess was that this handful of channels held more boats from the early 1900s through the thirties still in regular use than anywhere else.

It is the kind of theory you can test by asking everyone to bring their boat to the same dock on the same day.

They took the idea to the Les Cheneaux Chamber of Commerce, talked thirty volunteers into helping, and in 1978 the first show happened in Hessel, a town you can walk across in about ten minutes. The theory held. It has been held every August since.

The setting does a lot of the work. Les Cheneaux means “the channels,” and the name is exact: 36 islands sitting close along the north shore of Lake Huron, with sheltered water running between them. That shelter is why the boats are here in the first place. This is water you can run a low-freeboard varnished hull through without taking the lake over the bow, in a part of the Great Lakes where that is not always true, and the islands filled up with summer families and boathouses on exactly that basis.

The show is now roughly 150 antique and classic boats and more than 300 volunteers, which in a town the size of Hessel means a substantial fraction of everybody. It is run by the Les Cheneaux Historical Association, which has had it for over thirty years, and it draws visitors from across the country for a single weekend in the second week of August.

The boats themselves are the argument. Chris-Craft, Century, plus the ones with no badge left on them at all, mostly varnished, mostly running, many of them owned by the same families for generations. There is a particular thing that happens with a wooden boat that has stayed in one place: it accumulates a record. It gets repaired rather than replaced, and the repairs are visible, and the person at the dock can tell you which of them their grandfather did.

The local history runs deeper than the show. E.J. Mertaugh Boat Works in Hessel, at the eastern end of the show, was the first Chris-Craft dealership anywhere outside Algonac, Michigan, where the company was founded. That is not a small footnote. It means this stretch of shoreline was buying serious wooden boats early enough to matter to the industry, which is the underlying reason there were so many old ones left to photograph in 1978.

What has kept it from turning into a car show on water is that the boats mostly still work. They arrive under their own power. They leave the same way. A festival built on objects that are used is a different thing from one built on objects that are displayed, and the difference shows up in how the docks smell, which is gasoline and varnish rather than polish.

It runs in Hessel, second week of August, one weekend, and the town is small enough that the show is the town for those two days.

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Sources, credits, and reporting details

Sources & accountability

How this story was reported

Editorial methodArchival synthesis

Last verifiedAug. 16, 2026

Corrections statusNo material correction note is recorded on this article.

Verification note: Ledger written 2026-08-16 before scheduling. The draft's builders line was cut to the two sourced for this show (Chris-Craft via the Association's history page; Century via Lakeland Boating on the 48th show). The largest-in-the-country claim is deliberately absent because the organiser claims only 'one of the largest'; the 8,000 to 10,000 visitor figure and the 36-island count are left out of the copy for the same reason.

Primary sources

1. Boat Show History — Les Cheneaux Historical Association

   Accessed Aug. 16, 2026.

   Supports: The show began in 1978, founded by seasonal residents Chuck Letts and Ken Horsburgh; the Association has run it for over thirty years; it now draws nearly 150 antique and classic boats and more than 300 volunteers; E.J. Mertaugh Boat Works, at the show's eastern end, was the first Chris-Craft dealership; the Association describes the show as 'one of the largest of its kind in the country'.

Additional reporting

1. 47th Annual Les Cheneaux Islands Antique Wooden Boat Show — WoodenBoat

   Accessed Aug. 16, 2026.

   Supports: Second-week-of-August timing and the Hessel waterfront setting.

2. 48th Les Cheneaux Islands Antique Wooden Boat Show celebrates 100 years of Century boats — Lakeland Boating

   Accessed Aug. 16, 2026.

   Supports: Nearly 150 antique and classic boats; Century boats present, the show honouring Century's centenary; supports naming Century among the builders shown.

Photo and media credits

1. Antique Boat Show (featured image) — Rebeccakardel, via Wikimedia Commons

   Featured image record. Published May. 1, 2011. Accessed Aug. 16, 2026. CC BY-SA 3.0.

   Commons file Antique_Boat_Show.jpg, uploader's own work, described and categorised as the Les Cheneaux Antique Wooden Boat Show 2011. Attachment 2468, 1600×900, cropped 16:9 from 4224×2816 and downscaled; crop box in the credit sidecar. Attribution and licence in the caption.

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