 Hello, everyone. Welcome. Okay, now I have lost my glasses. So here we go. I know. That might be too far. So bear with me. Well, yes. Well, what strength are those? So thank goodness for friends. Susan's a friend. Okay, this is better. Chris Sabeck joined the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in 1998 as an intern. Since that time, he has also acted as an archeological diver, conservation lab director, and the director of research and archeology. In November of 2023, Chris became the executive director of the organization. He earned a BA in history and anthropology from Ball State University. Let him win? Yes. Well, I thought you were. Second to you. And an MA from the Nautical Archeology Program at Texas A&M University. Chris has more than 25 years of experience leading the archeological examination of underwater sites related to the military and commercial history of the northeastern United States and Canada. I know we're in for a treat. Please welcome Chris Sabeck. Thank you everyone. Appreciate that very much. And thank you for the introduction. That was fantastic. I'm here to talk with you today about the history of Lake Champlain. And I tend to title my basic history presentation about the lake as the highway to history because that's really what it was. It's this water corridor through the wilderness, certainly in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it really was the only way to move men in material and trade goods through this area effectively and efficiently. So let's dive right in here. So of course we're talking about the history of Lake Champlain. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. But Lake Champlain is about 122 miles long. It's about 12 miles wide at its widest point. It empties to the north of the Richelieu River, which then drains into the St. Lawrence. And at its southern end, at the town of Whitehall, New York, it's about 40 miles from the headwaters of the Hudson River. There was a combination of all these waterways that really formed this highway to history as we like to term. And it was control of this corridor, this transportation route through the wilderness that really made Lake Champlain such a vital piece of geography during the military part of the lake's history and then ultimately the commercial and trade part of its history as well. There are rapids in the Richelieu River, so you can't take a boat from Lake Champlain to the St. Lawrence directly at this time. And obviously you have that little overland route from the southern end of Lake George or the southern end of Lake Champlain to the headwaters of the Hudson. That made it a little more difficult, but despite those obstacles this was still certainly the most efficient way to move large amounts of men and material through the area, which was otherwise a fairly trackless wilderness certainly in the 18th century. We tend to break the history of the lake down into four principal eras. The first and by far the longest is the Native American occupation of the Champlain Valley. And then we have the military history of the lake and commercial history and where we are today in the recreational period of the lake's history. I would like to think that we're starting on a fifth era here and that would be an era of conservation. Conservation not only of the beautiful lake and its natural resources, but also of its cultural resources. And for me that means the shipwrecks and the other submerged sites in Lake Champlain. There's a lot of effort right now going into water quality and bringing up Lake Champlain and into preserving its natural resources and its cultural resources. I'm going to have to add a new bullet to this slide. I guess it's up to me to decide when. I think we're there. I think we're there. So starting with the first period, the Native American period of the lake's history is by far the longest. We have Native American populations moving into the Champlain Valley at least 12,000 years ago, if not longer. And they utilized Lake Champlain for the same reasons that Europeans would later when they came in. It was a transportation corridor. It was often a boundary between tribal entities. Of course, it was a source of natural resources for food and other resource management that they had to do. It was a trade network. It fulfilled all these same roles that it would later in the lake's history as well. Sadly, it is the portion of the lake's history that we have the least archeological evidence for that comes from the lake itself anyway. There's obviously an extensive amount of archeology that's been done around the lake and around its tributaries on Native American sites, even stretching back as far as 12,000 years. But we find very little Native American material in the lake itself up to this point. That means we don't really know how to find it yet. Or at least we haven't put the effort into trying to find it. And if that's something that any of you know somebody that's really interested in doing, have them contact me because I'd like to talk with them about how we should go about doing this. In these pictures here, obviously we have Native American hunting, spear fishing from a Birchbark canoe. We have this dugout wooden canoe on the right here, which is actually not from Lake Champlain, that's from Shelburne Pond, but it gives you an idea of the type of watercraft that they were using on these waterways around the area. Undoubtedly, there must be some remnants of dugout canoes in Lake Champlain. I haven't found them yet. And the only Native American artifact that I've had personal contact with that was certainly found in the lake is this small pot that's pictured down here at the bottom. It looks much bigger than it actually was in this image. It's about the size of half a coconut. It's this tiny little vessel. But it's one of only four known examples of this pottery style that's intact that have been found. And the story of how this came to the Maritime Museum initially was quite dramatic. Some divers were diving off of Thompson's Point, kind of in the deepest part of the lake's depths. And they found this small pot. And they were curious about it. They just threw it in the back of their pickup truck and they came driving down to the museum. And it was apparently rolling around in the bed of the truck. And, you know, this was before my time. But when the archeologists, you know, they got obviously really excited and really interested in it. And it's one of those things that if it was still in the lake today, you never would have found it just like everything else on the bottom of Lake Champlain is these days. So it would have just looked like another rock or log or whatever under water covered in mussels. So it was a very opportune time for this thing to be discovered. The style is, stylistically, you can date this pot to about 1800 years ago. So it's quite old. And as I mentioned, it's a very rare example of this type of pottery. It has now been transferred to the Chimney Point Historic Site where they have it in storage at their location. But we transition into the military history of the lake pretty much immediately with the arrival of Europeans. You know, Samuel de Champlain, when he arrives in 1609, literally inserts himself into a conflict that was happening between rival tribes along Lake Champlain and uses his, you know, European firearms to have to have a dramatic result in this little conflict that's happening at the time of his arrival. So this is not to say that there wasn't conflict happening between tribal entities prior to the arrival of Europeans, but Europeans quickly realized the importance of this water corridor and of the immense natural resources of the Champlain Valley. So pretty quickly you have this, the establishment of fortifications along the length of the Hudson, Lake George, Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River to try to control this corridor and the trade associated with it, which at this time was mostly the fur trade, of course. You know, you have the establishment of what is now known as Fort Ticonderoga, then when the French built it would have been Fort Carillon as well as the fortifications at Crown Point, when the French built their small fort there was Fort St. Frederick later replaced by a much larger British fortification that you can still see today. Very impressive if you haven't been down there to see it. It's quite huge. That's the one that's directly on the other side of the Champlain Bridge. The military period included all of the colonial wars. They almost all have at least some naval component that happened around Lake Champlain and we have evidence of these activities, at least from the French and Indian War. There's a number of shipwreck sites down near Fort Ticonderoga that date to the French and Indian War, to the 1750s, which are some of the oldest inland shipwrecks in North America. The military period really comes to an end after the Battle of Platsburg Bay during the War of 1812. But let's talk about the role that Lake Champlain played in the American Revolution really quickly. These are our three main areas of interest for St. John at the very northern end Fort Ticonderoga and what was known then as Skeensboro at the very southern end of the lake. That's Whitehall, New York today. In the fall and winter of 1775, American colonial forces actually invaded Canada, captured Montreal and moved on to try to capture Quebec City during the winter of 1775. Using this water corridor as one of their avenues of attack into Canada. That attack on Quebec City ended badly for the American forces. They weren't able to capture the citadel of Quebec before a bunch of British reinforcements arrived from the continent. And the American forces were forced to retreat up the St. Lawrence and ultimately up Lake Champlain to Fort Ticonderoga and Skeensboro where they started to build a fleet of ships. And the British were kind of hot on their heels and they settled at the northern end of the lake at Fort St. John and they also started to build a fleet there to contest control of Lake Champlain because it was this important transportation corridor. So over the summer of 1776, Americans built a fleet of about 15 vessels which consisted of 8 what were called Gundalos or gunboats. This is the gunboat Philadelphia as an example of this that we have a replica of at the museum and is in the Smithsonian in Washington D.C. Also included three rogue alleys which were larger more powerful, better sailing vessels than the gunboats. That's what's being built there on the back left of the upper image much larger and you can see the gunboats quite a bit smaller in front. Those gunboats are about 54 feet long and 15 feet wide carry just three guns. The rogue alleys more like 74 feet long and 20 feet wide and carries 10 guns. The gunboats all three of the guns that they carried were all pointed in different directions so they weren't actually the most effective fighting vessels the rogue alleys have a more traditional broadside like you would have with other naval fighting vessels at this time. In addition to those let's say 11 vessels they had four smaller sailing schooners that they had captured earlier in 1775 that they incorporated into the fleet as well like the one in the center of our bottom image there which is the Royal Savage which until the rogue alleys were completed acted as Benedict Arnold's flagship for the American fleet. I should mention that Benedict Arnold was in charge of the American fleet on Lake Champlain at this time. So while the Americans were building their fleet the English were building their fleet the British were building their fleet up at Fort St. John they had better resources and better sailors that they were able to bring to the fort they were able to construct a much more powerful fleet. They actually disassembled some of their vessels where they took from the that were already in the St. Lawrence fleet they took all the upper works off of those boats and they were able to drag some of them up the falls through the rapids in the Richelieu River to get them to Fort St. John and then they rebuilt them they had some of their gun boats they also had a whole cluster of gun boats in their fleet though they opted just to have one gun and it just pointed out the front of the boat. Anyway, those were sent over as kits they had been already constructed in England they had been disassembled and all the parts numbered and they sent them over here like a little model pack and they just were able to pre-assemble them pretty quickly. So those two fleets finally met in combat in October of 1776 at the battle of Valcor Island if you're not familiar with Valcor Island in the south of Plattsburg, New York and Benedict Arnold shows a really interesting position for his fleet between Valcor Island and the New York shore so that's them on the upper part of this image tucked in behind Valcor Island and this was a clever position because he knew that the British who were coming down from St. John they would only be able to leave St. John with a wind out of the north to carry them up the lake and in this case with this position they actually had to sail past Valcor Island and then try to swing around and come up into the wind to come to grips with the American fleet and a lot of the larger vessels in the British fleet just couldn't do that and that's why you see them kind of down here in the foreground where they didn't actually participate to any great extent in the battle the majority of the fighting on the British side was conducted by the gun boats which you can see on the line here shown stretching from shore to shore that's probably a bit of an exaggeration and a couple of their better sailing schooners were also able to come up into the wind but the largest, most powerful vessels from the British fleet were not able to engage in any significant way for most of this conflict the fighting on October 11th of 1776 started about 11 o'clock in the morning and lasted until nightfall and the American forces when night fell they were they found themselves very short on ammunition and short on gunpowder and trapped they were now trapped in this little pocket that they had created behind Valcor Island the British settled back and created a blockade from the southern tip of Valcor over to the New York shore in an effort to keep the Americans penned in there so that they could finish them off the following morning but in quite an incredible feat of bravery the American fleet decided that they had to escape they had to find a way to sneak through this blockade and flee south on the lake hoping to get to Crown Point and for Ticonderoga they actually hung a lantern in the back of each vessel that was shrouded on three sides so it could only be seen from directly a stern and the boats lined themselves all up single file using those lights as guides and then with muffled oars and in strict you know absolute orders of silence they were able to find a path along the New York shore through the British fleet and escape south now they may have been greatly aided by the burning of the Royal Savage right this vessel that had been the American flagship early in the battle it had run up onto the southern tip of Valcor Island you can see it here right there stuck on the island and the British took the opportunity in the evening to burn that vessel so that the Americans wouldn't try to re-occupy it and put it back into the fight I'm sure that proved to be a fantastic distraction for all the poor tired British sailors who were supposed to be manning this you know this picket line probably were gravitating their eyes gravitating towards this giant fire that was happening on the southern tip of Valcor Island we also have to remember that the majority of these sailors were probably functionally deaf at this point after cannon firing for you know ten hours or eight hours during the course of the day there's weapons are incredibly loud if you're standing near them I'm sure that both of those factors worked in the Americans favor and allowed them to escape the American fleet fled south briefly near Skyler Island to patch holes and to fix rigging they carried on through the day of October 12th the British realizing that their quarry had escaped set off in pursuit of them and ultimately Arnold realizing that he was going to lose the fleet because the British were catching up with them he drove the American fleet or what was left of it into what we now call Arnold's Bay at the time it was Ferris Bay the remaining vessels and the crew members escaped on to shore and overland down to Fort Ticonderoga so that's the kind of broad brush history but let's talk about what archeological evidence we have of this I'm only going to talk about a couple of things because there is actually an extraordinary amount of archeological evidence from this three day battle from October 11th to October 13th in 1776 probably the most famous piece of that archeological evidence is the remains of the gunboat Philadelphia which sank at Valcor Island after the fighting had started to slow down the boat which had been hit by a 24 pound cannonball right in the bow of the vessel stove in a number of planks there and on a 24 pound cannonball is a good size hunk of iron I have some friends who are working on this boat which is now in the Smithsonian and they say you can see this the path that this ball took from one side of the boat to the other where it just shredded all the wooden components of the boat on its way through so it was going down and luckily they were able to most of the crew was able to escape on to one of these larger rogue alleys that you see in the background here this one being the rogue alley Washington so that boat sank at Valcor Island and it was rediscovered in 1935 by a gentleman named Lorenzo Haglund who was a retired U.S. Navy diver and had started his own kind of salvage corporation and did a lot of boat recoveries throughout the northeast he was vacationing on Lake Champlain became infatuated by the history of Lake Champlain and the number of Revolutionary War battles and shipwrecks that were in the lake and he set about to try to find some of these wrecks in 1934 he recovered the remains of the Royal Savage that boat that had burned on the southern tip of the lake and with the success of that he set about trying to find the Philadelphia and in 1935 he was able to locate the Philadelphia and raise it and you can see here as it broke the surface that the vessel is basically intact all its guns were still on board there was a big artifact collection still inside the mast is still standing the top mast and some of the rigging is missing but other than that pretty much all of the pieces were there that boat toured around as an attraction for 25-ish years and ultimately upon Haglund's death it was accepted into the National Museum of American History run by the Smithsonian Institution in DC and it's still on display there now here's a picture of it in the galley up on the upper right that boat is actually in preparation for 2026 which is the 250th anniversary of all this stuff the Smithsonian is having the vessel re-conserved re-analysed they're doing a lot of really interesting and amazing work around it as we speak so you may be hearing more about the Philadelphia as we go forward when it was accepted into the Smithsonian they carried out an extremely detailed documentation of the shipwreck and its construction and we at the Maritime Museum utilized that set of plans to create a replica of this boat a full-size functional replica of the Philadelphia called the Philadelphia 2 which you can see under construction here and under sail there to the left of it that boat was launched in 1991 so at this point we still have the boat not on the water anymore she actually sank during the pandemic during the winter and we had it raised and the insurance company said you know you probably really basically they said we're not going to insure that again if you put it back on the water so it's sitting on the lawn at the museum now that many years for a wooden watercraft is pretty exceptional we're happy with what we've got out of the Philadelphia too and it's still a great teaching tool even though it's on the hard now we also have the remains of the gunboat Spitfire so again as they retreated south from Valcor and the night of October 11th into the 12th they had to abandon two more gunboats in the vicinity of Skyler Island one of those was the gunboat Jersey the Spitfire they attempted to sink both of these watercraft and they were successful with the Spitfire which sank into deep water they were less successful with the Jersey which the British found the next morning swamped but still floating at the water surface and they were able to recover that vessel and incorporate it into their fleet which is exactly what the Americans didn't want and why they sunk the Philadelphia and ultimately burned their other vessels this was a big thing in century naval warfare if you can capture enemies of vessel instead of destroying it then you can incorporate it into your own fleet and make your own fleet stronger Spitfire sank into deep water and it was not seen again until 1997 when it was rediscovered during a lake-wide sonar survey that the Maritime Museum carried out in collaboration with Middlebury College Middlebury College geology department was really interested in collecting you know detailed imagery of the bottom of the lake for geological studies and we piggybacked our study onto theirs and were obviously interested in the cultural resources that were identified during this process and one of those was the gunboat Spitfire the boat still sits today in deep water and what you're looking at now is a three-dimensional model of this wreck that was just created back in the summer of 2022 using a process called photogrammetry we collected 30,000 photographs of this wreck from every conceivable angle and using new computer software you can stitch all those images together and create this fantastic three-dimensional model that shows the site as it existed at that time so now we're hoping to use this model for future planning on what we're going to do with the Spitfire the vessel still technically belongs well not even technically it belongs to the U.S. Navy any vessel that sunk flying a national flag remains the property of that government in perpetuity so this still belongs to the U.S. Navy even though technically the U.S. Navy didn't exist at that but that's beside the point so everything we're developing some management plans and priorities for this vessel but anything that we propose to do we'll have to go through the Navy get their approval and hopefully their participation because they certainly have access to resources that we don't at the Maritime Museum but you can see again the vessel is virtually intact it only has one gun still present the one in the bow the two guns that would have been pointing out to either side the waste guns are missing and we're presumably dumped overboard as they retreated south in an effort to keep the boat afloat as long as possible and certainly something that we hope to locate in the future if possible but really a remarkable wreck and we're starting to create an advisory council of other cultural organizations and archeological professionals and technical divers to think about how to you know what kind of research design what kind of research questions we want to ask about this wreck and what kind of methodologies would we use to excavate it, document it recover artifacts from it you know hopefully to coincide with the 2026 anniversary of all these actions taking place so hopefully more to come on that as well evidence of the war of 1812 in Lake Champlain is also pretty extensive when the war broke out in 1812 Americans found themselves with only just a few gunboats on Lake Champlain that were still left the entire Revolutionary War fleet was gone and so all that was left was they had a couple of gunboats that were used for basically revenue purposes customs control kind of situation on the lake so they realized very quickly that once again this water highway was going to be used as an invasion route so got to build a new fleet and they sent this gentleman who seems to have an incredibly long neck I'm not sure what's going on with this image but his name is Thomas McDonough and he was promoted to Commodore sent to Lake Champlain and told to build a fleet he found an existing shipyard below the falls on Otter Creek in Virginia he took over that shipyard and began building an American fleet there guess what once again the British started building their fleet there history repeats itself even though it's just a few years later the position below the falls in Virginia was certainly a wise choice because the falls powered several sawmills ironworks all of those things you need to build a fleet of vessels very quickly in the wilderness and those two fleets once again met in combat on September 11th of 1814 at the battle of Platsburg Bay so frankly just a little bit north of Valkor where the previous battle had taken place and quite interestingly McDonough chose a position not unlike Arnold's at Valkor he hid behind Cumberland Head and anchored all his ships in a line and forced the British to sail around Cumberland Head and up into the wind to come to grips with them those were as I mentioned anchored held in position and as the British came in they were just able to blast them apart with broadsides as they came in and as their vessels started to get damaged on one side with using the series of anchors they had out they could actually pivot the boat 180 degrees and now you've got a fresh broadside of cannon that you could start to fire at in hopes of stopping the British from doing exactly the same thing the British anchors actually targeted the anchors on the incoming British fleet and at least one of them was shot off and relocated in 2001 and that's this enormous anchor that's here at the bottom which was shot off of the British flagship the Confiance which is the largest sailing ship to ever operate on Lake Champlain this anchor is about 14 feet from tip to tail and the wooden cross piece is also about 14 feet long and total weight is 3200 pounds this anchor has a number of cannonball dents in it and quite remarkably on the flukes or the palms of that anchor the weight of the anchor is painted on there and that paint survives and on the other one it says the word Quebec because this anchor was constructed in England and then shipped to Quebec and ultimately on to Lake Champlain and so it was had a shipping label on it which is extremely cool and you can see that preservation here is rather exceptional particularly for the part that was buried in the mud there's not even any rust on this metal as opposed to the part that was sticking up out of the mud has kind of thick chunky rust on it but the thick calcium based clay that we have at the bottom of Lake Champlain forms an anaerobic environment so there's no oxygen there the preservation even of things like iron is exceptional when it's buried in the bottom of Lake Champlain now the Americans were a little more successful at the Battle of Plattsburgh Bay and were able to defeat the British fleet and capture their all of their vessels I don't have a slide of it but after as the war started to wind down the Americans took the remains of both fleets the American and the British fleet all the way down to Whitehall and they laid them up in ordinary or what we might call mothballing today and there were remains of several of those shipwrecks still in the Pultney River at the very southern end of Lake Champlain you know and it was after the war of 1812 we really transitioned into the into the commercial period of the lake's history and that's not to say that there wasn't any commercial traffic before or during those previous conflicts but that's really became the focus after the war of 1812 we had a number of sailing fairies and sailing vessels operated on Lake Champlain as well as Lake Champlain was an extremely early adopter of steam technology in fact the second the world's second successful steamboat was on Lake Champlain there was a steamboat on Lake Champlain in 1809 so before the war of 1812 there was a functional steamboat the Vermont pictured here at Basin Harbor in this Ernie Haas painting and in fact that shipyard that McDonough took over in virgins was in the process of building another steamboat on Lake Champlain when he stepped in and took over the shipyard so there was the possibility that we could have had the first steam powered warship in the world but McDonough realized that first of all steam technology to an old sailor was anathema I think and also one cannonball to the boiler and this whole thing would have blown up so anyway they converted that haul into a sailing ship and that became the Ticonderoga which there are remains of the Ticonderoga still on display in Whitehall if you're passing through there it's a very sad sight unfortunately because it's just rotting away but there are still some there anyway I digress we also have the option of some really interesting technologies on Lake Champlain like a horse powered ferry boats one thing that happened when steam technology moved in to the area is that people got used to things running on a schedule right you could actually schedule when a boat was going to arrive and when it was going to make its next stop that had never been the case before right if you were on a sail ferry if the wind was blowing the wrong way you just didn't leave that day you waited until the wind was in the appropriate direction before you went someplace so the idea that you could schedule things became understandably popular so one adaptation to this new reality was the creation of these horse powered ferry boats not everyone could afford the extremely expensive steam engines and the specialists that were needed to maintain and run those steam engines so they created this horse powered alternative and we one of these types of horse boats was located in Burlington Harbor in the late 70s or early 1980s which this bottom image is I know it's hard to decipher what that is but that's a photo mosaic of this wreck right after it was first identified in the 1980s and it has one of the first things you notice is it's got paddle wheels on either side so the initial thoughts were like oh this is a cute little steamboat this is really interesting you start looking inside of it and there's no machinery there's no boilers there's no engines there's not even any place for them to be but what you do find is under the deck there's this huge turntable that you see drawn out here and that's you can see some spokes of it coming out here underneath this deck planking there are two holes cut out on either side of that deck that allowed access to that turntable the horses would stand on the turntable and as they walked they turned this huge turntable sent power through the drive shaft back to a set of bevel gears that then transferred the power out to the paddle wheels and they could turn it they actually had the ability to shift this boat into reverse without having to turn the horses around so that's pretty handy and what we see on the left there is the ultimate evolution of this technology where the horses actually stood on a treadmill and they turned a treadmill that was connected by belts to the paddle wheels and then that turned the paddle wheels but this is the only known example of a horse powered ferry boat that's found in Lake Champlain and the fact that it was found in Burlington is kind of odd because as these were horse powered they weren't able to do really long crossings the horses would just get exhausted so there's no way it was actually operating from Burlington that's where the lake is the widest so probably it had operated in a narrower portion of the lake and had just been brought to Burlington for repairs and when they decided it just wasn't worth fixing it was sunk intentionally is our hypothesis but we do have historical documentation of horse powered ferry boats operating from Basin Harbor over to Westport which is a little over a mile that's a much more reasonable distance for horses but a really cool interesting adaptation of technology there and it wasn't until 1823 that we have the establishment of the Champlain Canal that the commercial era really blossomed 1823 we have the construction of the canal stretching from Whitehall New York to Waterford, New York to the Hudson River and now suddenly you could take a vessel that you loaded with goods in Plattsburgh or in Burlington and you could take it all the way to New York City without ever having to transload your shipment this reduced the cost of shipping by 90% but it had normally cost $10 a ton to ship from Burlington to New York City now cost $1 and as you can imagine that created a huge economic boom in the area suddenly there were hundreds of canal boats being built and you had massive natural resource extraction from the Champlain Valley into these canal boats that were then sent down to New York City and ultimately also connected to the Erie Canal and could go out west and they would come back with manufactured goods and other products that you couldn't manufacture in the Champlain Valley itself you know the majority of these canal boats were totally unpowered they were hauled through the canal system by horses or mules and then when they got to the open water of Lake Champlain or down on to the big waters of the Hudson they would raft up into these huge long chains of boats and be dragged with a tugboat in early years just an old steamboat that was put into as a used as a towboat to tow them up the lake to their final destination and like I said there were hundreds of them this is an image of the opening of the canal in the spring in Whitehall New York and this is all the boats lining up to go up the lake you can see there's just dozens and dozens and dozens of them they were typically kind of owner operated and I like to think of these boats as the tractor trailers of their days right this is the semi-trucks of their days usually a family unit operated the boat and they lived in that small stern cabin at the aft end of the boat which is maybe a 12 by 12 space where your entire family lives the rest of the boat is you know it's a cargo hold so it I'm sure was a very sparse life but we had thousands of people that were involved in the canal operations and had a very unique and distinct culture which examining these canal boat shipwrecks has really revealed to us it's been quite fascinating and on Lake Champlain we had a rather unique evolution of the canal boat in that we had sailing canal boats these were obviously different from the unpowered traditional canal boats in that they carried folding sails folding masts and sails with them so when they got to the lake they could put their masts up set their sails and sail to port and they didn't have to wait sometimes days or even a week or more for these long toes to be arranged and they could get to port sooner and obviously if you get to market with your good sooner you're going to get the best price for them etc etc so a very effective technique and these continued in operation into the late 19th century and there started to be enough tow boats that you just didn't need you know it didn't take as long to form those rafts of boats up and you didn't really need the sailing rig which did take up space inside the boat that could be used for cargo but we have ample evidence of sunken canal boats in Lake Champlain and one of my favorite stories and one of my favorite wrecks to dive is actually the General Butler which is pictured down here on the bottom the General Butler was 1862 class sailing canal boat that was in December of 1876 it was making trying to make one more journey with a load of cut stone to Burlington the captain at the time Captain Montgomery had himself and his crew he also had his daughter and some of her friends on board who were going into Burlington to do some Christmas shopping but as it started to storm up I think I said already but it was December 9th so I'm sure it was already pretty cold and nasty and as they tried to round the southern end of the breakwater in Burlington their steering mechanism broke and they were headed straight for the breakwater so Captain Montgomery was able to deploy an anchor stopped the boat temporarily they jury rigged a new tiller on to the rudder post and they cut the anchor loose and as they tried to get around the end of the breakwater they just didn't make it and ended up running into the breakwater itself so now the waves are lifting this boat up and dropping it on to the breakwater and as they did so realizing that it was about to go down with every time it hit the breakwater one of them took the opportunity to jump off on to the breakwater you can see that very dramatically happening here in this another Ernie Haas painting so they had Montgomery was the last to get off the boat and as he did the boat sank and went down and so they survived this shipwreck but now they're stuck on the breakwater in the middle of this tremendous storm and apparently quite a crowd had gathered on the shoreline to watch this drama happening but nobody was brave enough to hop into a boat and go save them except for this man up here James Wakefield who was an old salt had spent many years as a mariner in saltwater situations and on Lake Champlain he ran a chandlery shop on the Burlington waterfront so he sold sales and equipment for vessels and if you're familiar with Burlington that's where Shanty on the shore is now that was his shop he grabbed his 14 year old son threw him into a row boat and they rode out and rescued all these people from the breakwater and this is something we commemorate at the Maritime Museum now with our rowing program we build rowing gigs for school groups to use and for physical education programs and they have the James Wakefield Rescue Row every year where they do a big row around and commemorate this exciting hopefully it's not during a storm and there's nobody no half frozen people to recover but always an interesting story to tell that boat settled to the bottom it was rediscovered in the 1980s and it was actually one of the first times that anybody had discovered this sailing canal boat unique thing that nobody had really known about before this is some of the previous documentation but recently I was able to produce another three-dimensional model of this wreck itself and this is what it looks like today you can see the two mast stubs with the mast tabernacles which is where you would pull a pin out open a hinge and then you could fold the mast down whereas a traditional sailing ship the mast would go all the way through the deck down into the bottom of the vessel and be mounted into the keel or keelsen at the bottom of the vessel so those are very distinguishing features of the sailing canal boat you can still see the cargo of stone cut stone blocks down in the hold the family's cast iron cook stove is still in the cabin it's a really neat wreck to dive and it's only in about 40 feet of water excuse me so it's very accessible for almost all divers so steam technology as I mentioned Lake Champlain was a very early adopter of steam technology but that continued right up into the 1950s the use of steam boats on Lake Champlain and so there's ample evidence of sunken steam boats in Lake Champlain 2 and probably my favorite story from the steamboat era is that of the Champlain 2 which started its life as the Oaks Ames the vessel that was built in the 1870s actually as a railroad car ferry at this point in time there wasn't many crossings of the lake for railroad for trains at all so this boat was built to be able to carry about a dozen railroad cars from one side of the lake to the other because there were train tracks that ran down both sides of the lake that they just weren't interconnected at all so this boat was basically just a big open space it actually had two steam engines one to power each paddle wheel which made it extremely maneuverable kind of like a caterpillar tractor it could basically spin around on the spot if it wanted to it operated in that capacity for a number of years until a couple of railroad causeways were established across the lake and it was no longer needed as a railroad ferry so it was sold to the Lake Champlain Transportation Company who ran the passenger steam boats on the lake and they converted it into a very opulent steam vessel for their operation in July of 1875 it was under the command of this gentleman Captain L Rockwell who was the longest serving steamboat captain in Lake Champlain history started working on steamboats when he was 12 and I believe he was 92 when he finally retired and ultimately died I think he was driving the Ticonderoga so he got to see a long swath of steamboat history on Lake Champlain the boat is leaving Westport, New York headed north Captain L Rockwell it's around the middle of the night he decides it's time for him to have a rest so he puts his cap his pilot John Eldridge in charge goes back lays his head down on his pillow and just a few minutes later he just hears this terrible rending ship destroying noise and he comes running back up to the pilot house and he finds the Champlain too he doesn't just run aground he does really run aground and you know he quickly springs into action make sure that everybody gets off the boat nobody's injured he's able to save all their cargo and their luggage during this whole hubbub Eldridge, the pilot disappears off into the woods and they don't find him for a few more days and they come to find out that this guy was suffering from gout and he was a lot nomadic so he was high as a kite and either fell asleep or didn't realize what was happening and just drove this boat full steam up onto this rocky point here the boat was only insured against fire damage so it was a complete loss the transportation company came in and they recovered everything that they could out of it they rolled up the carpets they took the steam engines out and actually put those into some other boats they even took as much of the upper works away as they could and recycled that wood into other projects some of the local folks that lived along the shoreline there did the same thing they came down and harvested parts of it there are a number of houses on the New York shore in this area that have components of the Champlain tube built into them and there is even the pilot house was recovered by a family that lived in Charlotte at the time who went in the winter of 1776 they went over there, removed the pilot house onto a sledge, dragged it on the ice all the way back to Charlotte and that was their camp for a number of years was the pilot house and the new owners of that plot of land have incorporated it into their house and I got to go see it a few years ago it's remarkable to see intact what's left of this wreck which is really just the bottom of the boat is now part of the underwater dive preserve system which is a series of shipwrecks in Lake Champlain that you can visit safely for divers the general butler that we talked about before is also part of that system the canal era and the commercial era really particularly the canal era really came to an end with the continued expansion of the railroad network area the canals continued to be expanded up until the creation of the New York state barge canal system in 1918 but shipments of stuff really dropped off pretty dramatically in the late 19th century railroads can run year round obviously the canal system closes in the winter it ends up being more efficient to use railroad for hauling a lot of bulk goods and ultimately the canal trade dies off the steamboat usage on Lake Champlain really died off with the construction of the Champlain bridge in 1929 the bridge ironically was built with that huge arch in the middle to accommodate this vessel the Vermont 3 which was the largest steamboat on Lake Champlain at the time and pretty much as soon as the bridge opened that boat shut down and was sent off so the rest of the 20th century all we had was the Ticonderoga which of course is now at the Shelburne Museum and if you haven't seen it you should definitely go it's just a beautiful boat and the fact that we still have it is quite remarkable that's really as you know when the commercial era started to wind down we did continue to have some commercial traffic through the barge canal into the 1950s 60s and a lot of that was actually jet fuel that was coming through the barge out to go up to the Platsburg Air Force Base that was some of the last commodities to travel through the Champlain so that brings us to the recreational period of the lakes history obviously sailing, kayaking, fishing power boating having a grand old time out there and as I mentioned before I'd like to think we're moving into the conservation era of the lakes history because we all realize what an absolute gem this lake is and its natural resources and cultural resources have so much still to tell us and so much to learn from as we work to preserve the lake and the things that are found within it so that's my presentation today I'd be happy to take any questions thank you very much wonderful Kathy anything from zoom hmm ok coming the other direction sir of course is that better thanks off of Blanchard Beach like a sort of a rig obviously they had taken fuel or oil off back to the tanks in the back there that's right so was that all part of the tugboat system at one point it was yes those are what's often referred to as oil dolphin and that's exactly right that's where large fuel barges or oil barges to pull up and then they could pump from those dolphins up to the big tank farms on shore and at one time there was lots of those all along the Burlington waterfront and the point south if you think about in the past Texaco, what's commonly referred to now at the northern end of Burlington is Texaco Beach it's called that because Texaco oil had a huge tank farm there and there were a number of those dolphins there that pumped up to there and that's also how they transferred this jet fuel to this to the Air Force Base in Platsburg was by using those dolphins so these enormous fuel barges didn't have to get too close to shore they could just pump while they were still out there safely and that those dolphins off of Oakledge they're the only ones left the rest were removed in the early 2000s and it's still it's a fun place to dive around because it's really shallow until you get out to those dolphins and then you know when these barges were pushed up against the dolphin and they pumped them out the tugboat sat there with its engine running hold it in place so there's this huge washout crater on the bottom of the lake and then everything from the surrounding area floats in there and you find all kinds of weird stuff down in there but that's the deepest part of your dive is when you dive down into this little washout hole okay what else anybody else have questions working hold on how much we're microphone challenged my friend and I were down by Perkins pier and three people from Japan or China came through two were journalists one was a photographer okay and they asked us if we had seen the lake monster and I just wondered what progress has been made a very relevant question and you know about every five or six years a film crew typically from Japan comes and is looking for these you know crypto creatures or whatever they call um no sign of champ yet that I've seen I will tell one anecdote about champ and I'm a firm believer in the myth of champ I don't know if I'm a believer in the reality of champ but anything is possible it's a really dark it's a really deep lake anything's possible but my one the one moment I was nervous about being in the water with champ was doing a night dive on a shipwreck very similar to the general butler called the O.J. Walker it's a little bit further out in Barlington Harbor we were doing a night dive a whole group of us from waterfront diving center and as we came back to the surface right this this is also a wreck that's in the preserve system so it has this big buoy that you tie your boat off to and then you dive down to see the shipwreck we as we came up and did our safety stop you you tend to stop at about 15 feet below the water surface you pause there for five minutes so you can off gas some nitrogen and stuff from your dive and we decided we'd all turn our lights off at that point it was super creepy everybody had also a glow stick hanging off the back of their tank just as a backup light and we're just sitting there bobbing around I'm looking up and there's this big buoy above me looks like a fishing bobber and I'm like a I'm like the worm hanging out down here I was just waiting for you know I turned my light back on pretty quickly that's my only quasi champ experience the lake gets to 420 feet and it's deepest which is actually near this point actually the average depth of the lake is 70 ish feet so you know there's a really deep channel down the center of the lake of course south of the of the Champlain bridge it barely gets above 20 feet in depth the inland sea up near St. Albans also quite shallow you know maybe 50 feet deep so it's the numbers really skewed by that very deep trench down the center of the lake so perfect place for champ to hang out and breed new generations of champs any other questions anyone else okay I've got one coming hold on thank you I went in on your website a couple days ago when I heard you're going to come here and I went and did some see what y'all were doing and there is some a lot of reference to some steamboat disasters where a lot of boiler explosions and there is like counted in the references in the newspaper counts and everything there's probably about seven different steamboats just spontaneously exploded do you have any stats on how many of those boat disasters there were I don't and the majority of those when you hear about steam of boiler explosions that was typically on the western river steamboats which had you know the steamboats that operated on the Ohio and the Mississippi river systems they had to be extremely shallow vessels so they tried to build them as lightly as possible and that included the machinery so the machinery in that case was a high pressure system that they could build relatively small but had enough force to make the boat go pretty fast and that led to the possibility of this kind of boiler explosion which apparently were just absolutely horrendous because right you know suddenly this the worst disaster I think it was a vessel called the Westfield that was carrying a bunch of Union troops after the war it had I think 400 Union soldiers on board and then you know a huge percent of them were scalded to death by this boiler explosion on Lake Champlain with the side wheel paddle wheelers that we had they were actually a low pressure system engine system mostly so boiler explosions weren't a huge problem on Lake Champlain the majority of the wrecks here of steamboats were we did have one steamboat fire the Phoenix in 1819 that's another vessel that's in the dive reserve system sunk up on Colchester Shoal the other wrecks that we have were almost all wrecks that were abandoned you know were sunk on purpose because their use life was complete and were just pushed up one other question is the Ticonderoga was put in dry dock here in the 50s and there's a sister ship that when I came up here and found out about that it was still operating somewhere in another great lake area it was sister ship to the Ticonderoga and it was into the 70s it was still taking trips I think that's you might be thinking of the Mount Washington that was over on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire yeah and you know you can still go down and take a steamboat ride on Lake George but those are modern reconstruction there was never any efforts to keep the Ticonderoga alive I just think it wasn't financially viable anymore you know at this point the passenger service was dead it was really only used for excursions which apparently did a fair number of but I think it had just become financially unfeasible and luckily Electra Havenmire Web stepped in to save the boat which is something that could never happen in today's day and age the amount of effort and work and expense that it went to making a dry dock building a railroad bed letting that boat settle draining the dry dock and letting that boat settle onto a cradle that could be then dragged over land where it sits today it's unbelievable and if you do get to go see the Ticonderoga at the Shelburne Museum they have wonderful videos of that whole operation that I watch every time I'm there I'm also very impressed with how fast that boat was you see it moving down the lake in those videos and it's got this big walking beam engine right on top it's a single cylinder cylinder is three feet in diameter I think you can climb down inside of it if you had to so it's just going donk donk donk donk but the boat's going you know probably 20 knots it's really cruising along so very impressive piece of machinery in the Ticonderoga glad we still have it Chris this has been terrific thank you so so much thank you very much everybody I appreciate it