This book is about what happened when Tappan Adney travelled from New York City to the small town of Woodstock, New Brunswick in 1887 at the age of 18. The coming of this young man to this town at this particular time is surely one of the most remarkable instances in Canadian history of the convergence of person and place.It is not unusual for writers, artists, and other historically significant figures to be strongly associated with particular cultural regions from which they draw inspiration. But the coming of Tappan Adney to the central St. John River Valley of New Brunswick was an event of unique and extraordinary importance in Canadian cultural history. It was here at the mouth of Lane’ s Creek where it meets the St. John River in Upper Woodstock that Tappan Adney first met Peter Joe and saw him building a Maliseet birchbark canoe. It was here he began to document how these canoes were made. It was here he began to build his 1/5-scale models that preserved every detail of construction using only t