Lake Champlain
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Lake Champlain Maritime Museum
Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, a nonprofit located in Vergennes, Vermont, shares underwater discoveries and lake history with the public in exciting and imaginative ways. The study of historic shipwrecks and nurturing traditional maritime skills inspire the museum�s hands-on programs, full-scale working replica vessels, and dynamic exhibits at a four-acre lakeside campus.
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Lake Champlain - Lake Champlain Maritime Museum
Tichonuk.
INTRODUCTION
Lake Champlain is one of the most beautiful places on earth. Cradled between the Adirondack and Green Mountains and formed by glaciers, it is often presented as the nation’s sixth Great Lake. Smaller than the other Great Lakes, Champlain stretches 120 miles in a north-south orientation and up to 12 miles wide and surely can be counted among our nation’s most historic waterways.
More than 12,000 years ago, generations of native peoples inhabited the lakeshore and surrounding forests, traveling upon the lake and its tributaries in dugout and birch bark canoes. They hunted and fished the lake and rivers, raised crops in the fertile soils, and occasionally made war on their neighbors. Long before Europeans arrived in the area, Abenaki people lived on the eastern side of the lake, with villages located near the mouths of Otter Creek and the Winooski, Lamoille, and Missisquoi Rivers, hunting territories that were also defined based on watercourses. Mohawk people have lived for millennia on the western shores of Lake Champlain.
In July 1609, French explorer Samuel de Champlain was guided by native allies from the north to the large lake filled with beautiful islands and a great deal of beautiful country around it.
During times of conflict between tribes to the north and south of the lake, most native inhabitants of the Champlain Valley dispersed to avoid the combatants. Champlain’s brief visit of about three weeks culminated in a battle that introduced the region’s native people to gunpowder weapons and established the Mohawk–British and Abenaki–French alliances, which determined the course of historical events in the region and, ultimately, changed the world.
For the next two centuries, the French and the English brought their Old World conflicts to a New World stage, with native peoples being drawn into the Europeans’ quest for furs, forest products, and territory. French, British, and Americans constructed fortifications along the waterways and built naval ships to control the movement of armies along the north-south axis that separated French and British territories. Lake Champlain’s location between the two expanding European colonies and its capacity for large vessel navigation made the waterway a strategic prize. France and England fought for control of the Lake Champlain region for 150 years.
Great Britain’s victory over the French in 1760 ushered a new era of relative peace into the Champlain Valley, but this was short-lived. Great Britain’s American colonies were moving steadily toward rebellion. In April 1775, hostilities began with the shots heard ’round the world
from Lexington and Concord. Just three weeks later, offensive actions were taken against the British on Lake Champlain. So began a three-year drama in this northern theater that helped define the outcome of the war. When the Revolutionary War was brought to a close, the United States of America emerged into the world of nations and Lake Champlain became a transportation superhighway.
The same attributes that made the lake so valuable in war now made it a principal artery of peaceful transportation and trade. With few decent roads and a limited number of bridges, water was the highway in all seasons. Soon after peace was declared, former soldiers who had visited the lake in times of war began to migrate to its fertile shores and rich forests filled with valuable timber and abundant game. The best trees were harvested for building homes, barns, and boats, and the remaining trees were burned for potash and charcoal in the process of converting the forest to farmland.
Champlain Valley residents used oars, paddles, and sails to power small boats, and commercial sloops appeared on the scene. Resourceful entrepreneurs assembled huge rafts of pine and oak timbers, some covering several acres of water surface, and followed the flow of water to the north. Most boats terminated their journeys at St. Johns, Québec. Log rafts could be broken down into smaller components, driven through the rapids at Chambly, and then reconstituted for their journey to Québec City, where the timber was sold and shipped to Europe. These timber rafts often carried a cargo of barrels filled with potash, also destined for the markets of Europe, where it was used in the manufacturing of soap, glass, textiles, and gunpowder.
With each new navigation season, the number of vessels involved in transporting people and goods throughout the lake increased. Responding to the needs of the growing population, docks and warehouses were constructed and waterfront communities began to develop along the increasingly busy lake. Ferry crossings were established and began to advertise their services.
The first decade of the 19th century saw a momentous innovation on the lake that was to change the maritime world profoundly: the advent of steam power applied to watercraft. After the appearance of the world’s first successful steamboat on the Hudson River in 1807, Lake Champlain’s first steamboat was built the following year in the bustling port of Burlington, Vermont. For the next 150 years, steamboats played a starring role in Lake Champlain transportation.
Shortly after the steamboat Vermont I began service, increasing tensions between Great Britain and the United States escalated into the War of 1812. On land and water, Lake Champlain was again contested. The American victory on Lake Champlain in 1814 paved the way for the alliance between the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, and the lake entered its commercial