A patternmaker’s engine and a partner who ran the business.

Evinrude is the outboard-motor name of Ole Evinrude, a Norwegian-born machinist who settled in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Historical Society’s Dictionary of Wisconsin History says he emigrated with his parents to a farm near Cambridge, Wisconsin, worked in Madison, Pittsburgh and Chicago, and then opened a patternmaking shop in Milwaukee, spending three years as master patternmaker and consulting engineer with the E. P. Allis Co.

His first ventures were not boats. The Dictionary says he designed a gasoline engine and formed a short-lived partnership, Clemick and Evinrude, to build it, then organised a company to make engines for horseless carriages, which failed. In November 1906 he married Bessie Emily Cary, whom the Dictionary describes as a grandniece of the Milwaukee pioneer settler George H. Walker, and the outboard business that followed was a joint effort.

The sources date its start differently. English Wikipedia says Evinrude built his first outboard in 1907, founded the firm in Milwaukee that year and introduced a single-cylinder model in 1909. The Wisconsin Historical Society dates the outboard motor and the organisation of the Evinrude Motor Co. to 1910. Both agree on the place and on the division of labour: Ole supervised manufacturing and made his own designs and machinery, while, the Dictionary says, Bessie Evinrude managed the business, took charge of sales and directed the advertising.

That arrangement ended in 1913, when the couple sold the business. The Evinrude name, however, stayed with the motor company they had sold.

In 1921 the couple returned with a new firm, the Elto Outboard Motor Co., with Ole as president and Bessie as secretary-treasurer, according to the Dictionary. English Wikipedia explains the name: ELTO stood for “Evinrude’s Light Twin Outboard”, a description turned into an acronym.

ELTO, Evinrude, Johnson: three names under one roof.

The two Evinrude businesses came back together at the end of the 1920s. English Wikipedia’s history of Outboard Marine Corporation says that in 1929 ELTO, the original Evinrude company and the Lockwood-Ash Motor Company merged into the Outboard Motors Corporation, with Stephen Briggs as chairman and Ole Evinrude as president. After Ole’s death in 1934, the same account says, his son Ralph Evinrude took over the presidency.

In 1935 the company bought the Johnson Motor Company, and in 1936 it renamed itself the Outboard Marine & Manufacturing Company. Wikipedia describes the three engine lines of that period in distinct roles: ELTO for the buyer seeking thrift, Evinrude as the prestige line and Johnson offering special features. In 1956 the name changed again, to Outboard Marine Corporation, or OMC, based in Waukegan, Illinois.

For decades the Evinrude and Johnson divisions were run separately, and Wikipedia says the separation fostered an intense rivalry between them, until manufacturing was centralised at Waukegan in 1978. During the Second World War, English Wikipedia says, the company built motors for military marine craft, and the Johnson purchase brought a refrigeration business that OMC ran as the Gale Products Division in Galesburg, Illinois. Over the following decades OMC also owned boat lines including Chris-Craft, Four Winns and Lowe, as well as the Lawn-Boy mower brand, according to Wikipedia. The arrangement meant that, for most of the century, two family surnames — Evinrude and Johnson — sat side by side on competing cowls from the same parent.

The name also reached beyond boating. English Wikipedia notes that a character in Disney’s animated feature The Rescuers shares the Evinrude name.

Design and documentation.

Engine makers and boat builders share a waterfront but tell their stories in different ways. An outboard or sterndrive maker speaks through a cowl, a badge and a run of model numbers that can stay in use for decades, while a boatyard speaks through hull shapes, deck layouts, gelcoat colours and the name lettered along the side. Many of these companies began as small workshops near a lake or a coast; some are still run by the families that started them, and others now sit inside large groups that also make vehicles, engines or other leisure products.

Because a boat can outlast several changes of owner, and a famous name can move from one factory town to another, the useful questions are simple ones: who founded the business, who owns it now, where the boats or engines are actually built, and how the names and graphics have shifted over time.

Each guide in this group sets what independent, dated sources record beside what the company says about itself, and marks clearly where a fact rests only on the maker’s own account.

From OMC to Bombardier, and the end of production in 2020.

OMC filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2000, and in February 2001 CBC News reported that Bombardier, the maker of Sea-Doo watercraft, had won the bid for the engine assets, including the Evinrude and Johnson brands, while an affiliate of Genmar took the boat assets. By 2020 the brand belonged to BRP, the Canadian recreational-products company.

Under BRP the brand was built around E-TEC direct-injection two-stroke outboards, later joined by the E-TEC G2. English Wikipedia says modern Evinrude motors were built and assembled in Sturtevant, Wisconsin, south of Milwaukee, keeping the name close to the city where it began.

On 27 May 2020 BRP announced that it would discontinue production of Evinrude E-TEC and E-TEC G2 outboard engines immediately, according to the company’s press release as reproduced by The Watercraft Journal on 29 May 2020. Chief executive José Boisjoli said the outboard business had been “greatly impacted by COVID-19”. BRP said the Sturtevant facility would be repurposed, that it had signed an agreement with Mercury Marine to supply outboard engines for its boat brands, and that it would continue to supply service parts and honour its limited warranties.

The name has not disappeared. In October 2026 the evinrude.com website remained online, offering outboard parts, oil and accessories.

For a design guide, Evinrude shows how a single founder’s surname, carried through mergers, sister brands and owners in two countries, can stay recognisable long after the original company was sold, and even after production stopped. Compare Mercury Marine, the Wisconsin outboard maker that BRP turned to in 2020, and Tohatsu, a Japanese outboard maker. For this guide we use lake blue, brass cap and spray blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Evinrude’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.