 We'll talk about his background in just a minute, but as usual, two announcements, here are two announcements. First one about next week, we'll let you know for next week, and we will be here again, and we'll have author Josie Dro, who will be talking about Vermont, Bizarre, and Baffling. Do you know him? I do. Yeah, okay. So we'll try to get him for Halloween, but he wants an available for Halloween. So that'll be next week. The other announcement, as we've been saying for the last couple of weeks, the program committee is meeting on Monday. It's coming Monday at 2.00 over the library at 10 o'clock. You're welcome to join us. If you can't join us, but you have program ideas, please either tell me or tell Edie or Bob. I don't see anybody else who can program a community today. Oh, right, it was here, too. Yes, ma'am. Or email them to Grace, and if you are a member, you got that email probably about that and about sending ideas to Grace. We do look at everyone's ideas that are submitted. We can't always get that person, but we consider every entry that we receive. So today we have the Jace, the Run Runners, the Boat Patrol, and Dr. Scotland Lockman is here. Scott was born Burlington, raised in Jericho. Since high school, he's been conducting Vermont Archaeological and Historical Research, primarily as an employee of UVM's Consulting Archaeology Program, and the late Champlain Maritime Museum. In addition to working as an archaeologist and museum professional, Scott has taught anthropology, archaeology, education, history, and sociology courses as a lecturer since 2005. And Scott is now the director of the Vermont Granite Museum, which many of you know because we visited there in the social assessment, and Vermont Project Archaeology, a professional development program for Vermont teachers. So please welcome Scott and Bob. Marge is also one of the volunteers at the Granite Museum, so thank you for your service there. So first I'd like to tell you how I got involved in this particular topic. Working at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, we're fortunate to get the donation of a rum runner's vessel, a beautiful, beautiful vessel that had been restored, built in the 1920s and was incredibly fast. And it just kind of fell in love with this topic. And then we were fortunate to have Merrick Carpenter, who was a pilot aboard one of the Lake Champlain ferries for almost 50 years. And he had all kinds of stories to share with us about rum running, because it was during the era when he started running ferries on Lake Champlain. And so, again, it was just a wonderful topic to share with the public as it came into the Maritime Museum. And then when I started teaching at the University of Vermont, the history department said, well, would you be willing to teach the history of Lake Champlainist? Oh, certainly. That's a great topic. I'd love to do that. But what I realized is that I only had some oil histories from Merrick Carpenter and a few other tidbits. And so I began doing research in the newspapers and also a little bit in the court records. And so this topic, I just scratched the surface of. Someone, and maybe myself in retirement, needs to research this in depth. It would be a terrific book, as you'll see today. So in terms of the topics we'll cover, we'll cover the Revenue with the Wrong Runners and the Booze, the three topics of choice. And if you've watched Ken Burns Special on Prohibition, it's a wonderful, wonderful series. Do try to get it. It's available on DVD. You can probably find one at the library right here that you can take and borrow and take home. But we'll just take some of the highlights for our particular region. And some of it really does have sort of a parallel to what's happening nationwide as well. The story of smuggling, though, is an important one to the Champlain Valley that doesn't begin just in the 20th century, but actually, in fact, goes all the way back to the colonial era. If you have to think about it, you've got conflicts that are occurring between nations. Those are big, amorphous kind of things. It's hard to detect what's going on. And it's the people that are living in the Champlain Valley that are exchanging goods. And they may or may not realize that, in fact, what they're doing is smuggling one happens to be on the French side of a conflict and the other's on the British, or one's on the Dutch and one's on the British. It doesn't really matter to those living in the Champlain Valley. They just need to exchange goods. They need to make money. They need to get the resources in order to provide for their family and their loved ones. And it's Whitehall in New York, the southern end of Lake Champlain, and St. John's at the northern end that ultimately becomes part of the smuggling on Lake Champlain. It's not really paid much attention to at the national level, not until the 19th century. And in the 19th century, we've got a conflict that's occurring in Europe. You've got the Napoleonic Wars. You've got Great Britain and the French that are battling it out. And the U.S. is sort of just plugging along in small little nations trying to do trade with the two countries and they get caught up in it. And Jefferson decides, enough is enough. Not trading with both of you. Well, that's a huge impact on those living in the Champlain Valley who depend heavily upon exchange between Great Britain and the fledging little communities developing in the Champlain Valley during the early 19th century. And there's no way they can stop that trade. It's going to continue. And that's why we have smugglers' notch. Unlike Champlain, the federal government will try to stop some of this illicit trade by building a small fleet of these gun boats. They're called Jeffersonian gun boats. Some are also patrolling the coastline as well. All from Maine all the way down to Virginia. And the idea was that they were supposed to stop the smuggling efforts. Well, it didn't. It continued on. In fact, even when the War of 1812 began, it didn't stop the smuggling efforts. It meant that everyone still had to exchange and Canada for their goods because there's no easy route to get to the Hudson Valley. That's an overland route of 64 miles from the Champlain Valley. It was not going to happen. You could go almost entirely by water by bringing your products from the Champlain Valley to ports of Quebec or Montreal. You simply had to circumvent the falls around Chambley, which is about between St. John's and Chambley. It's about 16 miles. And if you are fortunate enough to have high enough water, you can use the logs that you turn into a raft and just shove it through the falls and hope it makes it intact and pick it up at the other end. During the war, almost all the food that was provided to the British soldiers came from the Champlain Valley from this side. So Lake Champlain flows north. That's problematic for anyone who's interested in developing an exchange network that's going to go south. The Champlain Valley provides some great advantages for the smugglers. And it's long, 120 miles in length. It's got lots of bays and inlets. It's got 12 large tributaries that you can easily navigate good-sized vessels into. So you've got places to hide. You've got places to load and unload cargoes. And the population is growing throughout the 19th century. And what they're doing is they've got wood products and they've got to have an export market. And so why not use that navigable waterway Lake Champlain? Well Lake Champlain is part of a larger waterway route that will develop starting in 1819 with the opening of the first section of the Champlain Canal from Whitehall, New York to about halfway somewhere around Fort Edward. And then it'll continue to expand until it gets all the way to where the Champlain Canal is completed in 1823. So now you can transport all of your cargoes south. The northern route you could actually like I said, circumvent those or you could wait until 1843 when the Champlain Canal finally opens up and take your products directly by water routes entirely to the Canadian marketplace. Well once those borders open up it means you've got all sorts of goods being exchanged from Ottawa, Quebec City to the north and all the way to Philadelphia and New York City further to the south. And on those vessels there was often yes, legitimate cargo but then there was also illicit cargo as well as tariffs are being added to various products. So you've got smuggling everybody seems to think it's okay. But you've also got happening at the same time throughout the 19th century this idea that prohibition towards alcohol begins to increase in momentum. The first people that start to push the concept of those that are abolitionist but also are interested in templates. They're working through the network of small congregational churches and other organizations to try to push their idea that alcohol is somehow bad for society and it's sinful and they're building traction throughout the 19th century. And they begin to convince governments both in New York and Vermont and also small municipalities to decide that they want to create dry communities. And so there are option laws that are created in 1844 here in the state of Vermont. So sometimes will be dry your neighboring town will be wet. And obviously for the wet town that was an advantage you get a little bit more money. So it's not really effective it's stopping the production of alcohol or its sale within the state of Vermont. People at the local level. Statewide prohibitions don't happen until in the mid-century and are all failures. They never really made it off the ground. There's no real law enforcement. You have someone in your community that might be serving as a justice to the peace and they're not going to go after their neighbors. So ultimately it's just a failure right from the start. At the very end of the 19th century we start to see greater efforts trying to put pressure upon communities to become dry both in New York and Vermont. And again still not really effective because there isn't the law enforcement behind it as of yet. We don't have state law enforcement. Everything's still at the municipal level. In Canada they're trying to also do the same thing. They're having the same effects of tempered societies putting pressure on Canada and they actually decide to go nationwide. And they find again the possibility of being able to enforce it nearly impossible. And so they decide it takes two years to make this decision to go flip-flop from being fully prohibitioned nationwide to deciding well how about you guys if you really wanted at the provincial level you can enforce it. Because we're not going to do it at the nationwide level. And Quebec immediately decides let's go wet. And of course their neighbors are still dry which means that all of the manufacturers making alcohol in neighboring provinces, they immediately move to Quebec. And Quebec provides alcohol for pretty much the entire nation throughout the early part of the 20th century. And they start to place some restrictions though as we start to see the Volstead Act putting pressure on the province of Quebec. Since they're producing the alcohol, how do we stop the flood of alcohol coming into the United States from Quebec. And negotiations we made between the United States and Quebec to try to figure out how do we stop this flow. And much of it is just really ridiculous restrictions which don't really do much. There's also other restrictions which have been here in the Champlain Valley and that includes prohibitions on military bases. And that's something that occurred before World War I but really no one paid much attention until during World War I they really clamped down. Military police actually looked for individuals who were intoxicated both on and off base and they were reprimanded for that. And so you've got two large bases in the Champlain Valley both of which had thousands of soldiers and of course they were drinking off base. They just were fairly sober when they got back on base. The Valsed Act will take effect in January of 1920. And it comes with some pretty severe penalties if you're caught with alcohol. And at the time a thousand dollar fine that's essentially enough to buy yourself a house. And so it was a big enough slap on the hand that most people would decide to refrain from trying to sell or produce alcohol. But for those that realized that there was an opportunity to make enough money that that fine really was insignificant. And so they started to push the system as much as they possibly could. Another thing that's happening is the fact that just by tradition many households in the Champlain Valley produced alcohol. A lot of them would have apple orchards and why would you want those apples to simply to go to waste at the end of the season if you couldn't store them as whole apples. Instead you turn them into cider and then over the winter you allow it to freeze and you'll separate off you allow it to ferment and all of a sudden now you've got a concentrated hard cider that you can take and use from the rest of the year. Most of these people are using shallow wells. They're water necessarily during the summer isn't the best. There's a possibility of having some sort of contamination of it so you just add a little bit of concentrated hard cider it kills everything in that water and it's just fine. So the US government realizes it's not just happening here in the Champlain Valley but all across America. There's a tradition amongst individuals especially farmers to produce hard ciders, wines and even some distilleries and so it makes sense you've got to allow home production for home use but when you look at the numbers, 200 gallons that's a lot to drink in your household that's enough for every little kid in the household to have several gallons a week. So there was plenty to go around to find some alcohol from your neighbors and friends and family members in order to keep you supplied if you didn't produce enough in your own root cellar. And just to give you an idea of what the newspapers provided me as I searched through them this is the Burlington Free Press September of 16, remember it started in January, nine months earlier and they're saying the persistent wetness up and down the lake is issued by no means due to the water there's so much booze flowing that there was no way to stop it and most of this is all coming out of Quebec from the manufacturers there of wine and beer and it actually starts immediately in January and it does so thanks to these vessels these ice boats, there's a great one at the Elysian Plain Maritime Museum the thing is huge it's like 24 or 25 feet long and in the back you can easily accommodate 5 people well you also have one steersman and a lot of alcohol and so you can imagine 10 cases of alcohol on this boat flying at some cases up to 50 miles an hour on the ice and going from St. John Quebec easily into Burlington into Platsburg into the major communities and providing for those speakies that began to develop early on but pretty quickly the Champlain Valley recognized it was an issue as well as for those manufacturing alcohol in Quebec and that was a fact that you had wet communities in the Caribbean who were producing rum and other liquors in vast quantities you also had European countries like France, Italy, Spain producing wines and it was nearly impossible to compete with the prices that they could provide because they weren't carrying 10 cases they were carrying tens of thousands of cases of alcohol aboard vessels and they would simply stay off the coast just far enough so that they were in international waters and the US government couldn't do anything about it and all you need to do is just take a short boat ride for a few hours off the coast, pick up your alcohol and then drive it right back and so immediately those in Quebec and also in the Champlain Valley realized they had to switch their efforts forget liquor, that was definitely off the list focus instead on beer most importantly and then secondarily wine and what you could also do is start to promote the Champlain Valley as a destination for tourism and you could take a day trip across the border into Quebec get a little booze and then come back to the Champlain Valley if you think about all of the camps that are created in the 1920s around the Champlain Valley most of those were all built in order to comment that tourism that was coming from New York, Albany from Boston all would come here to the Champlain Valley to have some fun during the summer and look at the labels that are being produced for beer in Quebec it's the biggies of today Molson, Labasse these are the companies that went from fairly modest beer suppliers to ultimately being the largest suppliers in North America and continue to be king when it comes to quality of beer today and so without prohibition these companies would have dissolved the way they consolidated but unfortunately fortunately for them they opened to become king thanks to prohibition in North America just like our truck haulers it doesn't make sense for you to take up products deliver to the destination and then come back empty and so too to the smugglers during the prohibition era they haul alcohol in to the Champlain Valley and they smuggle other materials into Canada where which were listens but also difficult to get within Canada but easier to find here in the United States and that included things like narcotics cigarettes and cigars which were in some cases legal and then one thing that was certainly legal in the United States 100% industrial alcohol being produced not here in the Champlain Valley but in the Upper Hudson and then also along the Erie Canal again making it easier to transport that material by water there's no highway system at this point the road system is pretty poor that alcohol can be turned into something that could be actually used and consumed and this stuff is pretty nasty it would kill you if you were to drink this stuff it would cause blindness and death for anyone who drank the industrial alcohol but you have to refine it and then you turn it into something that's usable in terms of the smugglers themselves when you start looking at the newspapers as well as the court records you find out that they're all guys like this young guys who went through war one together they have just saw some bloody fighting they have had their adrenaline just pumped through the conflicts of war and they're looking for that high that they received and so they're interested in doing something risky something daring they just saw their fellow soldiers die beside them they're willing to take risks that they otherwise would not have if they hadn't gone to war they're also in some cases unemployed they're not interested in becoming a farmhand many cases they've got no real experience in any sort of occupation except as a soldier and so why not become a smuggler give it a try for many of them they find it very lucrative if it fills an internal need for having something risky and fills their pockets full of cash in terms of others that are coming to the Champlain Valley some of them are called vacationers but in many cases they only spend the summer here in order to take and deal with the rum running as it's called in the newspapers but as we know it's not rum they're running it's mostly beer and these tourists are often from Jersey from New York and they're part of organized crime these are people that don't want to remain in the city where it's nasty, hot, dirty stinky they would like to come to the Champlain Valley and vacation along Lake Champlain have fun playing on their boats and enjoy themselves as they drink alcohol with their friends as they invite them to come here and there are plenty of examples of these dens of smugglers all throughout the Champlain Valley some are organized communities that have a single location and others are like this one which I love so it's called Rochester Point it doesn't appear on any map there is no place in the Champlain Valley that has this name and this was actually a mobile community it kept moving around in order to make sure that no one caught them and what they did is they provided a party location that others would know about except for the police they often didn't know or they simply ignored it because they may have been going to the party and at these parties it was amazing they would have the best quality food, they have prostitutes they did everything that people would possibly want and they might spend a full week here and then disappear and the whole community would dissolve away and then it would move to a new location in terms of the smugglers themselves some were down on their luck farmed hands and just really could not make a living at anything they tried they stroked this is you're getting into the depression era as you talk about this era of prohibition and so some of us started losing their jobs early and so this is one example Charles Muscat Robert and Charles was one of those individuals who just had really bad luck everything he tried he failed that and he gets his name Muscat because of one evening where he was trying to take his cargo to his destination and he ran aground and unfortunately for him he decided to simply abandon his boat all of his alcohol and swim for it and there's cases like this over and over again but for him unfortunately it led to a prison sentence and then ultimately suicide he just could not couldn't pull himself together huge loss for his family and the community in terms of what was alluring them I mentioned the soldiers but there's also other things as well some of these farmhands the fast money that people were getting they were coming around with brand new cars they were having the best quality suits made for themselves and it was quite clear everybody in your community knew exactly who was running alcohol based upon what they were doing on a weekly basis they were sharing cash with friends they were taking eating out completely buying anything from the store everything was something that they would purchase and so it didn't seem like it was that much of a risk when no one seemed to get hurt they seemed to be doing well all the time and so for some they saw the list over here on the left that it was pretty clear that there's got to be a good reason that everybody else is doing it so I should do it too and when you look at the prices they're able to double their money just by going a short distance essentially 25 miles that's all you got to do is cross that border get it to a destination like Platsburg or Burlington and if you could start to tap into the larger network of smugglers if you get it to New York you can make a great deal of money and so there wasn't really much to prevent them early on that $1000 fine the possibility of a 6 month prison sentence you hire a good lawyer they'll get you out of it and that's what everybody kept saying and they were right for many cases they often did the idea of making $25,000 a year that's a lifetime's worth of earnings for a farmhand there's no way you could make that kind of money but you can do it in one year if you're a good smuggler well the Great Depression does finally hit it does transform the Champlain Valley it means that a lot of people are without work it means a lot of the factories have slowed down it means that the farmers are having difficulty getting their products to market they can't buy their seed and so a lot of the farms start being abandoned and more and more see this idea of smuggling as the only choice if they'd like to raise a family in the Champlain Valley but there are dangers real real dangers and again you can look at the newspapers and see those and many cases they're not reported so the ones that I do have is probably just a fraction of those incidents of things like running aground and the idea that you could actually have a vessel sink on Lake Champlain they're taking boats out that are really not very seaworthy they're stripping them down to bare bones and trying to carry as much cargo as possible in terms of Lake Champlain yes there are navigational aids but those aids are for commercial vessels they're not going to help you get in and out of small little bays which you're using for hiding locations they're for staying on the main lake staying out of all harm's way and in terms of the boats that they're transporting the cargo in they're motor boats and this is early generation vessels of the 19 teens and 20s this isn't the high quality engines that we have of today so the idea of one breaking down on you is probably pretty likely to be a pretty good mechanic if you're going to take and become a smuggler and this is something that many of them probably did not have and falling overboard well that's a possibility too because guess what you're traveling at night and you're traveling in the dark and simply tripping over a case that's in front of you is very likely and who's going to pick you up? No one no one's out there to collect you there is no Coast Guard there's no one out there to look out for you except for yourself and there's also the possibility that you're going to get shocked most likely by another smuggler someone else is waiting for you as you cruise by in the middle of the night knowing you're out there and they'll just keep shooting away in the dark and hopefully they hit something and if you do get caught there are all those consequences of the Volstead Act and one of those things that happens immediately is that you're going to lose everything everything that's in that boat everything on your person that is all going to be now part of the US government's property and they're going to sell it and that's what this is this is a Rousers point one of the sales that they had people would come from all around to see what kind of products that were being sold just as a witness to see what was being sold and then in some cases if you're a rum runner this is where you go pick up your stuff this is where you buy your boat back all the things that were important to you and put it back into service as possible in terms of the fines they are pretty severe and if you lost your load and you invested everything you had in the previous nights you may be stuck in jail for a long time because this has now become debtor's prison for many of these folks that were successful like Charles Muscat and going to jail doesn't mean you're going to be local based you're going to send you to a penitentiary where there's murderers rapists individuals that are pretty severe criminals and you're going to end up in Atlanta, Georgia long ways from home well the Volstead Act is a failure in part because there is great success on the part of some of these smugglers and so they up the ante the fines went up to $10,000 so it tells you that something's happening they're making a lot of money far more than other people thought possible five years of prison sentence instead of six months or one year so once again the risk is up but there's still people willing to take and smuggle in the Champlain Valley and they're pretty clever about it the types of boats that they transport material in is wide ranging trying to out outmaneuver both the law enforcement officials as well as other smugglers so a nice little day sailor you see coming out of Burlington they travel up to say Maquambe crossover they spend a little afternoon there have some food and then they come back you've got ladies with parasols on the back of the day sailor everybody looks good and happy well the hold is filled full of boobs but who's going to know right there's a lot of other day sailors making those same trips you've got canal boats by the thousands that are traveling back and forth through the waterway they are the tractor trailers of the 19th and early 20th century they carry everything imaginable well one of those is probably got a cargo legitimate and in the core of that cargo it also has illicit alcohol row boats take a small row throw out your fishing line it's got a false bottom in it and then you bring it back and if you make enough money you can invest in something like a criss-craft brand new vessel it might cost you as much as three, four hundred dollars beautiful teak decks, absolutely gorgeous boats it's got horse power which is comparable to anything we have on Lake Champlain today a thousand horse power on Lake Champlain today they had this in the 1920s they're buying these beautiful watercraft and using those they're buying the newest of marine technologies as well they're trying to figure out how to make these boats fast not for illicit trading but people that just like to go fast on a boat and the smugglers recognize well these are the best of craft because the possibility of debating someone is much greater if you can take and go as quickly as possible so four hundred and fifty horse power making fifty eight miles per hour on Lake Champlain I've done sixty and it's scary it's not something you want to be doing they had it loaded with alcohol and so definitely not a friendly operation and what's interesting to see is the fact that these guys that are running operations they're starting to create networks all across the Champlain Valley crisscrossing the lake they know one another they could be in different locations everything's all planned out they know where their destination is where they're going to pick up how much is necessary it's an organized business and some of it is organized crime which I'll mention in a bit one of those that was caught here in the Champlain Valley and the mouths they're carrying this boat where they fit it I don't know but they probably strapped it to the deck everywhere you could possibly fit it and this is what those beautiful criss-craft are turned into often the case it's gone all that beautiful material completely stripped just so it could hold cases of alcohol and this boat was actually one of the previous pictures one of the beautiful vessels four hundred cases again where did they put it you don't have that much deck level stacked up as high as possible so that you get very little free board maybe a foot or so and you're still trying to travel at 30-40 miles per hour in terms of your destinations most of this alcohol were named in the Champlain Valley if it's carried by anything but a canal boat canal boats aren't going to unload a cargo anywhere in the Champlain Valley they're going straight to New York Harbor that's where their destination is they're picking up cargoes in Canada with lumber could be hay and this is an era of transition in terms of transportation so in New York you still have thousands of horses that need to be fed and that hay is being cut in Quebec in the fields there so it's the major communities ones that are both industrial towns like for gins but also major centers like Burlington and Plattsburg and rail towns like St. Albans for Henry so this is where the alcohol is being consumed in the Champlain Valley and it's greatest of quantities that's your destination you simply have to get it into port and try to evade the law enforcement that might be there so all these vessels it doesn't matter what your type of boat is you can ultimately figure out a transportation route and a type of cargo that's most lucrative for you so here's the canal boats these canal boats were owned by families they're not owned by major companies and everyone at this point after the Champlain Barge Canal opens up in 1915 they own two of them they work in consort the kids are probably living in one cabin the parents in the other with the little ones and here's their laundry out for the day and to lose one or both of these canal boats you put them into bankruptcy there's no way they can cover it if you are traveling all the way to New York with your alcohol on canal boats then you're ultimately going for one of these speakeasies but there are also many of them here in the Champlain Valley all of your hardware stores grocery stores they all had a small back room and that turned into their speakeasy it's not like the ones in New York sitting where you got live music or something like that you buy your alcohol you chat with the owner because you've been friends for decades and then you take your alcohol home with you this is a great technique that I saw in the newspapers the idea of towing a log behind your boat everybody would just look at it and think it was just a drift but then you realize it's actually following the boat and inside that log would be filled full of bottles you're not going to make a lot of money off from that but for you and your friends the false bottoms in the small row boats again just line the whole thing roll it over, line it with alcohol bottles and then tack on the bottom the bottles are going to get wet but that's not going to harm them the idea of possibly getting caught meant that you had to find ways to evade the law enforcement in terms of finding anything of incriminating evidence on board your boats and so if you look at this vessel right here this is a criss-craft again absolutely gorgeous vessel, no teak deck it's all gone, everything, cabin and what they've done is they put these three slats on each side and they pile the cases right up on top of here strap them on just enough so that they're not going to fall off overboard as you're traveling at high speeds and then if you think you're being followed by a smuggler or someone in law enforcement then all you need to do is simply tip these boards over and boom all of your alcohol falls into the lake but you want to recover that, you don't want to lose it so you tie salt blocks to it the salt's going to dissolve and you the crates themselves are going to cause those bottles to float to the surface there's a little bit of air in each bottle the whole thing is going to go right up to the surface and so you just need to collect it after the salt dissolves depending upon the size of the salt block it might be 10, 18 hours later and you come get it smuggling by canal boats well, you ran the risk when going through customs of them finding the material as they took these steel probes and shoved them into the cargo and so it didn't take much for them to figure out as you push the probe in you feel resistance all of a sudden smash it's like uh oh we've got balls and they would force you to unload your entire cargo and so frequently they would require canal boatmen to unload their cargo if they spoke up and they started to give the customs agents trouble and if you had to unload your cargo that meant you might have had a delay of several days you had to unload it by hand there are no derricks or anything like that at the customs station nor designed to unload cargo there and so time consuming you could lose a great deal of money on a shipment so great story that I got through oral history since my dissertation dealt with the canal boats which I investigated is about 350 of them on the bottom of Lake Champlain I looked at about 225 of them and I collected oral history from people that lived aboard the canal boats during their youth and so Eva May Wilkins I spoke to, she was just outside of Albany and she remembers as a child when during prohibition they'd pull into Rouse's point of the customs station and her mother would say get on the potty, get on the potty so they'd pull out the potty from underneath the bed and she'd sit right in the very middle of the cabin and the cabins here at the stern the customs agent would come down the companion way and she'd be sitting there with a little dress over top of the potty and she'd stare at the customs agent and as he walked around the cabin she'd follow him and then he'd leave after looking through all the cupboards flipping over mattresses and she couldn't figure out, she kept telling her mother I don't have to go potty and she said don't potty well it wasn't until she got to her teenage years she found out that her father was smuggling alcohol below the deck of the cabin and guess what, the hatch was right underneath the potty so she had to do that for she said many years and when she got pretty old she was like I definitely don't want this man watching me sitting on the potty but she said she had to sit on the potty so right here in the middle of the cabin they'd often have some sort of hatch in order to get below there's a three foot difference between the cabin level and the bottom of the hold and that would be completely filled full of alcohol and that would be a little extra money that her father could make in order to tide over the winner because they obviously couldn't travel when you have ice on the lake and the canals and so they needed that little extra money so they could survive what they lived in port in terms of law enforcement the revenuers well an entire structure had to be created in order to prevent some of this smuggling and someone was at the federal level someone was at the state level and so at the federal level customs officers were told that the customs officers were way too busy doing other paperwork the customs station at Browses Point in St. Almond's was super super busy and there was no way they were going to take and deal with alcohol it just was not something I wanted to deal with so they sort of refused the border patrol which was supposed to monitor the people crossing well they had to deal with pull up your pant leg see what you got strapped to your leg really poofy dress today go to the back room, flip over your dress the lady is going to follow you and see what you got and so border patrol would do a little bit but they weren't interested in anything that was happening on the lake that's something different prohibition agents were hired in order to patrol the entire border region just looking for those smugglers and it wasn't until the marine boat patrol was established on Lake Champlain that finally someone would be out there looking for smugglers that were using the waterway itself at the state level the state police of New York had been developed just before prohibition and so they didn't want to deal with federal laws they weren't interested in that but unfortunately for them the state of New York would be pressured by the federal government to develop their own prohibition act like the vaults that act county sheriffs again they weren't interested in things to deal with and any of the municipal police in town constables they were dealing with people having arguments over who stole the chicken or my fence got knocked over by your cow again they weren't interested in getting involved in alcohol they didn't want to take and get neighbors upset about them they were more interested in just keeping the peace in their community in terms of New York's law and it was pretty short lived 26 months and it turned out to be a dismal failure much like other prohibition laws and the reason why is because they got 445 miles of border in order to patrol and there was no way, most of it was wooded small dirt tracks a lot of people that lived literally right on the border itself their house was split right in half by the border they had farmland on one side they had tracks running back and forth through fields there was no way you could patrol it was impossible they tried their best with what modes of transportation were the fastest and easiest to move around the time the motor car and the motorcycle and then often by horse as well Canada got roped into trying to stop the flow of alcohol by pressure from Washington they tried to convince the Canadian government that they were responsible for that flow of alcohol and they were like well it's your act not ours and they did that as long as they possibly could so from 1920 to 1924 they did the best they could and sort of refused to uphold any of the Volstead Act or the Jones Act but finally they would agree to just giving some idea to the customs agents and others in the US they would need some alcohol coming your way that wasn't enough because it usually came about 12 hours too late and then finally in 1930 there was a treaty agreement that was signed by Canada and the United States and they said okay fine we will stop the alcohol flow as best we can we can't promise anything but we will do our part in terms of the customs agents and those responsible for stopping the flow they could at the federal level there at Rassus Point in St. Albans and St. Albans is nowhere near the border it is a long ways into the interior there's no way they could actually take and do much to stop it and if it was flowing on Lake Champlain they couldn't do much because they're in the inland sea area they're way off to the east of the main channel where alcohol is mostly flowing and Rassus Point again not necessarily the most convenient spot it's also way too far into the interior in terms of Lake Champlain it really was an open season right till 1922 until the marine boat patrol was established and when it was it was pretty difficult to do because there were literally thousands of small boats on Lake Champlain and any one of them could be traveling with alcohol aboard but when it was established in 1922 it was a pretty small force a massive body of water in which to patrol and it was put together by John Jack Kendrick he was a veteran of World War I and he was sitting at the border many of these soldiers were given jobs to work at custom stations or border patrol stations or there were post offices and he was just bored to tears he's a 20-something year old he just did not want to sit there and he passed the border maybe four or five times a day he took the cows back and forth and so when someone gave him the opportunity to be on Lake Champlain he was like yes get me out of this place and he immediately went to his mother who had a cottage on Lake Champlain in Colchester and said mom can I use our dock and our boat and she said sure okay alright and so he had to put together a force of his own and he picked up other guys that were from World War I veterans and then he also decided to pick on this gentleman Armin Levine nicknamed Midget he was an amateur boxer short guy but a massive punch he was like this is my bulldog this is the guy that's going to help me knowing that he's going to have to take an approach to boat and he's going to need a bulldog to make sure things are under control and then he needed people that he could trust he knew he could trust former soldiers but he needed someone else to fill out his rank so he went right to UVM and he went to the best students he could possibly find and he also decided medical students they would be helpful something does happen and Bradley was one of those medical students that was with him for quite some time they got their federal uniforms the US government bought them a couple of watercraft eventually it was his mother's and they started at this dock right here in Malice Bay the problem is that it's well into the interior it's a tough one to get out to the broad lake so it takes a while though in order to get him convinced as well as the federal government that another station might be more advantageous for them so where do they go? they go to the Ulver Grafis Point railroad bridge here's a little shack where the operator was sitting and in there there was also some sparrow rooms which they used for his entire crew as they went out every night they would leave from here this is the broad lake this is where everybody has to go through if they're coming from Canada from places like the bucket of blood and other bars on the Richard and River and in terms of what he was able to do it's fairly restrictive the federal government told him that it was still on the water but if that case of alcohol was sitting on land he couldn't touch it he could only go after it if it was on the boat and he could search any vessel that he wanted to because he was not only upholding the laws of prohibition but he was also upholding laws that dealt with navigation on Lake Champlain that would be important in a few minutes so a lot of these guys that were smuggling they were trying to create transfer stations some said that they could possibly find on Lake Champlain they would take an outbuilding and they'd put it right on the lake they'd put it right down the waterfront's edge and if they could get their boat there as quickly as possible unload the cases within an hour those cases would be gone before law enforcement was able to get to that little shack in terms of seizures most of those seizures were ones that were pretty small on Lake Champlain and even along the border region as well and for many they would just let go so if you're crossing the border or walking crossing and if you had a flask in your pocket they just take the flask from you and say go away same thing on Lake Champlain if you're a day sailor you had two or three bottles give me the bottles and go and that would be about it again the idea was to stop the flow of alcohol and not upset those in the Champlain Valley in terms of the boat control craft well they realized that they were going to need faster and faster boats well they had the boats that they seized remember this one? that's the same boat isn't that sad just strip it right down and that's old pops and this is Flopsy Jane and this one also should get stripped down to her bare bones at some point unfortunately the federal government during prohibition it's during the height of the depression they want money they want the vessels after the seasons over with and who buys them? the smothers in terms of the canal boats no doubt there were many many boats that were carrying alcohol and some of them were captured at Rousa's Point by the customs agent and here's one really tragic story of one where they captured the vessel 94,000 bottles of ale were found on board and the captain was thrown in jail along with his wife and his children and then his wife and children were paroled they were paroled to someone in the community at Rousa's Point they lost everything all their belongings and dad guess where he was in? Georgia so I left the entire family destitute they had no place to go and so they probably went to a poor farm in New York and that's probably where the kids were raised while their father spent quite some time in prison and in terms of the alcohol that was captured in the article it said that everybody in town was concerned about the fish that they were capturing along the Rousa's Point pier it's like this is a lot of booze am I going to get drunk eating this fish? am I going to get arrested for eating this fish? if he is drunk so there were a lot of comical things in the newspaper people just didn't realize what was going on in terms of the cooperation that was taking place in the Champlain Valley as prohibition continued on into the 1920s greater and greater effort was had to try to create this cooperative effort amongst individuals across the lake and a lot of them were buying these faster boats taking greater risk and some of them were trying to attack others who were on Lake Champlain that made there was a greater risk of harm but also to the boat patrol and here's an example of the increased level of recognition that Lake Champlain would be an important corridor for large sources of alcohol especially for organized crime in the New York City metropolitan area so Snyder is one of those individuals from New Jersey he vacationed at Maquam Bay and he decided that he was going to take and have a boat design just for him and this is what it looked like this is another one, very similar to it these were made by a marine outfit in New Jersey it's got two Liberty engines coming right out of the airplanes from War 1 back to back the most powerless thing had it was reinforced hull in order to withstand the speed at which it was slamming against the waves and this is good for both on Lake Champlain closed water compared to the shorelines of New Jersey and New York going out to Long Island and so this was his playbook he drove from Maquam Bay through the islands all the way up the Richelieu to bars like the Bucket of Blood and he got drunk loaded a few cases of booze into his boat and then head back to his camp at Maquam Bay well Kendrick decided that he was done with this guy he'd been zipping through the Rousous Point bridge for quite some time and he wanted to capture him but every time he crewed through he seemed to have someone there that understood that Snyder was on his way home and he couldn't quite figure out what was going on but he decided there's got to be some way in which to stop this guy so what he decided one night is that he was just simply going to follow him all the way home he knew where he was headed and he knew he couldn't catch up to him so he just kept plodding along going through the islands with his fairly fast boat but eventually getting to Maquam to his dock parking his boat and the guy he was with on that night was wondering how are you going to take and arrest him the alcohol is going to be gone there's nothing you can do about it he's also upholding all other federal laws including navigation laws so he pulls out his book and he starts taking notes he was running with no navigation lights Snyder was he had no handbook he had no life jackets so it was this long litany of things that Snyder was violating in terms of federal laws and he had no prohibition and so he walks up to Snyder and Snyder says you can't do anything to me and he asked him to turn around he put him in chains and he hauled him to the St. Alms and threw him in jail and he explained to them why he was arresting him and he said well I'm getting happy here as fast as I possibly can well the judge refused to go to the courthouse that night so Snyder had to spend the night in jail Snyder had been having a prohibition and this is almost nine years later that he's captured and so Snyder had evaded the federal government who had been trying to get him for nine years Kendrick got him threw him in jail and made him humble at least for that night and as soon as he gets out once he did he buys his boat back Snyder and others recognized that the boat patrol was getting a bit more savvy about their operations on Lake Champlain and there'll be some pretty serious incidents that will take place at the end of prohibition and one will involve Mr. Midget here Armand Levine and another one Lawrence Izard the two of them were sitting at the Rassus Point Bridge and they realized that every time they went to go and get a snack eat a meal and not be paying attention to the water all of a sudden the boat go flying through the Rassus Point Bridge it was like how can that happen every single time they sat down a boat would go flying through they realized that it must be the operator for the bridge which is a swing bridge for the railroad he's in on this he's alerting the smugglers that they are sitting inside and they're not paying attention and so what they did is they sneak up and sure enough they watch him switch the lights he's flashing the lights so that the smugglers know that the bridge is open come on through and so they decide that that night what they would do is stretch some ropes between the piers they know that the commercial craft are not out there it's the middle of the night they know that the pleasure boats are not out there it's the middle of the night and if they've got running lights they'll see them and they can take down the ropes but these guys are running with no lights and sure enough they go flying through they hit the ropes it all gets tangled in the prop they're still trying to move and the ropes are just getting pulled in sucked into the prop and they're slowing down slowing down, slowing down, slowing down and they figure we've got them and so they take off the boat patrol does and they expect they're gonna catch up to them soon and they're still bouncing through waves trying to catch up and what ends up happening is Lawrence jumps on to the smuggler's boat but unfortunately for Lawrence they're ready for him they beat him with clubs they beat him with bottles and then they throw him overboard it's pitch black yes Midget's got some running lights but they can't search the entire lake and he's just fortunate that when he's coming back about to abandon the search for his co-worker that there he is he's bobbing away in the water he's wearing his lifejacket it's the only thing that saved his life if he hadn't worn his lifejacket he would have never been recovered another one is a gun battle that takes place and this is one that starts in the broad lake right off in Burlington and they're shooting back and forth and at some point this Lawrence Bob Cobb falls overboard not sure exactly when it happens but it's out in the broad lake somewhere the next morning not only the boat patrolman go out to try to search for their co-worker but so does almost every commercial operator on Lake Champlain on a small boat all the tugs, the ferries and guess who else is out there the smugglers it's a community they still feel like there's some connection to this there are hundreds of boats that are looking for his body there's just too much water there's too many opportunities and all the bays on Lake Champlain there's no way that 16 men can possibly stop the flood of alcohol with organized crime with a network that had developed over essentially a decade nothing was going to stem the tide of the alcohol there was still a great desire and in many cases there was more people drinking during prohibition than before in most communities more alcohol was consumed per person in the United States during prohibition than any time in his history so it's just impossible to stem this tide and so it becomes quite clear to many people in the Champlain Valley that this effort is a dismal failure one that they will not support one that they acknowledge that needs to come to an end pressure is placed upon politicians to bring it to a close it's starting to split communities split families and it's one thing that they would just like to see go away it's a black eye and this doubtful behavior starts also transitioning people from recognizing federal and state and municipal laws as being something you must follow to being something eh all of these but that one I don't like so we get to the point where we start to question the authority of those who are making laws and there's a ramification that comes with this and it's a moral and social one that comes to our communities and families and now it also there's doubt on the intent of our law enforcement are they looking out for us or are they not are they just upholding laws which may not actually benefit us in any way and so again there's all this questioning which never occurred in the 19th century which starts to appear as part of kind of an American identity in the 20th century prohibition finally comes to an end in 1933 and immediate sales I mean immediate the minute it's over with it all comes out in the back room comes right to the front and the beer and spirits and wine start to flow and it's not just in New York City like this paper and others highlight but it's all throughout North America everybody seems to be celebrating except for one group Quebec the manufacturers are like oh no we're going to lose our United States and we're going to lose our market share and they're right immediately there's a decline in the amount of alcohol produced in Quebec and also the amount of alcohol that's being sold by those that are bringing it from the Caribbean that are selling it on the coast in terms of this willingness to break laws we can still see that today there is still smuggling happening in the Champlain Valley that happens every single week I don't hear much about it but just talk to someone who works on the border and every single week there's someone they capture who is trying to transport either people or goods across the border in one direction or another if you want to learn more about this I would suggest three resources two that are up here that are published books long since out of print and the third just go to the newspapers go online, go to Chronicling America it's a library of Congress website and you start searching for through the papers of the 1920s and early 1930s and every day you can sit there you can read all the events that are taking place and on page three is the lake section of the Burlington Free Press I read every single one of them but not for this project I looked for material about the canal goods I wish I had taken note of the material of the prohibition but I did it at the time but now the search is a lot easier I did it on microfilm you can do it on the computer right from your comfort of your own home and that's a terrific resource and some also the court records are becoming available through the state archives of Vermont as well New York is still holding tight on to its court records but Vermont is trying to make those available to the public those are two great resources and one other thing to note is if you haven't been to the credit museum recently you need to get there because Chris Miller is nearing completion of the statue that's going on the state house dome and it's supposed to be put up there on November 14th on the dome and he has been literally working himself to death lately he just worked a 20 hour work day yesterday and he's going to he's destined to try to get this done as best he can and it's amazing sight and this piece is going to last I've been 160 years before that will have to be replaced on the dome the last two lasted 80 years each and they made out of pine and they were covered with white lead paint and it wasn't well maintained this is made out of mahogany rock resistant tropical wood it's going to be coated with an oil based stain and so that's going to allow deep penetration and we have one thing that we haven't had up until about 10 years ago and that is drones the drone will be able to be flown right around this every single year and they can detect any issues so it can be repaired and dealt with immediately so this is going to be amazing sight to see so are there any questions? yeah oh about 25 or 30 years ago before my mother-in-law died who lived in Burlington and her family had a camp on Malis Bay and she tells the story I finally, she didn't like both very much but I took her out one day out to the broad leg from Malis Bay and she told me the story about as a girl she used to go out with her father on Sunday afternoon or Sunday evenings and he send rum runner and get the weak supply of wood yep and blew me away but she was a very properly so there's a good story yeah I've always been social about smuggler's notch and the geography of that doesn't seem to fit in with your thesis so smuggler's notch was used for cattle so they drive the cattle up and over the mountain because otherwise you'd have to go all the way up to Morseville and follow essentially what is route 15 today why is that smuggling? so they were taking the cattle to the British soldiers across the border during the war of 1812 that's definitely smuggling you're taking it to the enemy not good yep I think I've got this right there was a newspaper column published in the 20s and 30s by a cockroach who did his thing by bouncing around on the keys at least that was the story Archie and the Hiddable you remember it was written by Don Marcos actually okay when prohibition ended there was a column written by Archie prohibition is over and a lot of patriotic Americans are trying to drink the country back of the prosperity thank you yes would you comment on the role of women in their opposition to drinking the country? yes so the temperance societies although organized temperance societies came to an end at the beginning of prohibition women still in church and communities tried to stem the tide of alcohol being consumed in town and so they often would point out to people at church who had been caught drinking alcohol and those are the stories I find in the newspapers every once in a while usually it's the gossip column section within the newspapers so exactly they have really good arguments they write speeches and they would take some of the old things that were done by temperance societies going back to the 18 teens and they'd kind of rely put life back into those speeches during prohibition as well a nice job by the way you're welcome that's not Blake Willoughby there's some caves they've said the wrong word oh I don't doubt it now there's places where they would stash the material and just keep going and then someone else would pick it up some good stories that you can find on the rum running through the land in those books I just showed you and one talks about a rum runner that goes all the way from I think it's Newport and travels all the way through Montpelier and gets to Berry and they're intended to sell it within central Vermont but they get a flat tire right in front of the police station in Berry person the only state in California about a speakeasy there's definitely places that you could have picked up alcohol in Montpelier had to be around Montpelier someplace but again the speakeasies weren't like the ones in New York where you'd have bands playing things like that instead for Vermont and the Champlain Valley you have places like Cedar Beach which is now a great big community of people with camps were constructed in the 1920s through the 1940s there were log cabins and then you've got Malletts Bay all the cabins that were constructed there and you can look at some of the posters of that era of artists that were coming here singers it's amazing, it's like all the jazz singers you have also plays there was a beautiful playhouse that was built in Morseville and today it's still standing it's a big old barn that they converted and they would take and bring plays from Broadway up to Morseville they do portions of the play test everything out on the stage there before taking it to Broadway there were that many tourists coming up here to drink alcohol and enjoy themselves during the summer it's just boggles the mind so Basin Harbor Club been around since 1911 Basin Harbor Club and others were really really strategic locations are right on the lake they could drink alcohol they could serve their visitors the things that they needed it was definitely Newport is definitely one of those locations now any place it's got a nice easy transportation route that's easy to evade there was no boat patrol on Memphormagog but you did have your customs agent there you had also your border patrol and they were supposed to be executing the federal laws but they frequently just turned a blind's eye so isn't this how the Kennedys made their money? it is it definitely is now there were a lot of people that were investing in plantations in the Caribbean and manufacturing facilities they were operated by folks from places like New England they would go to the Caribbean and they created the network they had the business ties they had the social elites who wanted the alcohol wanted a consistent supply line and so the Kennedys and others would be more than willing to provide that we had a band director Green and Harold his sister worked in the garage in the very where they modified cars oil onto a hot engine create clouds of smoke so when they would meet the moves coming down from the monasteries in Canada by the Black River they would drive on back roads and if anybody was following them they could do this they do that they also throw out spikes so throw out nails and things like that on the road right behind them all the tires are balloon tires for the 1920s and early 30s so they're like a bicycle tire they pop very very easily it doesn't take a lot of effort and once they pop a tire they're done so they're not going anywhere speaking easily in Barry once the prohibition ended he told me that it moved up to the Canadian border and nobody knows exactly how to do it up there wow well I know that for Barry since you have a large Italian population at the time that's in fact moving to Barry at that time during the prohibition they were unwilling to give up their wine and their homemade grappa and so what they did is they would get rail car loads of grapes that would come from Central New York and they'd get several of them from August right through till now in October the end of the grape season and families would go down and they'd get crates and crates of grapes and remember they were allowed to make 200 gallons at home production but in many cases they made far more than 200 gallons and shared it with other community members beyond just those in Barry and Montpelier so make a little extra money I guess I'm feeling funny about the male female us and them in the prohibition concept I've read a little history about women being asked to take a shot before quilting gatherings and maybe you have some I don't have any history about that that's cool I don't know the tempered societies you're right they weren't all just women it was men and women that were members of the tempered society and even during prohibition there were some ministers that tried to convince their congregation that they needed to take and follow the federal laws and their attempt was largely in vain some of them were Congregational church were they tied directly to the tempered societies and that is true so many of women in the state of Vermont during the 1820s and 30s were Congregationalists and so they frequently are the ones who are starting the tempered societies and they start spreading going from church to church to church and what they're doing is they're giving speeches about temperance and the value it is to individuals and to society and that's how it spreads I grew up in Maine and Neil Dowd was a congregation minister who started many of the tempered societies in Maine and one of the issues for the women in Maine anyway was spousal use and it started as that was one of the issues that became important for the women in the tempered societies what quick point about your slide about industrial alcohol there's I know this because laboratories can get pure grade alcohol so that it's not adulterated with metal but it's not the ethanol in that in the other stuff that's high proof alcohol but it is adulterated slightly with methanol and that's what makes people go it's actually pure grade alcohol it doesn't and the other thing is there are states in this country where we can now get pure grade that have been abled in for years get pure grade alcohol with a revenue stamp on it and it's hilarious because in Knoxville, Tennessee you can get because I know that actually the next county over one county is dry you can't get you can't get even beer on the Sunday it's hilarious because we took a friend who's German pizza the airport is actually in one county and he wanted the beer on Sunday and he gave us as long as he could but then he has over from Christmas and he had his bottle of PGA and I've never seen PGA before and he got it from a liquor store in Knoxville and I actually bought a bottle of this stuff and it comes with a great big label on it that tells you it's straight out well it's extremely dehydrating and it just burns like crazy it acts it makes it with fruit juice or something but of course I bought it oh boy it really is extremely hard to eat because it's very dehydrating thank you everybody if you have any other questions or comments thank you