Lake Champlain's Sailing Canal Boats by Arthur B. Cohn
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his summer, residems of the C hamplain and Hudson Valleys will have an opportuniry to experience a piece of their histo ry not seen for more than a cemury. In July 2004, the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum launched an 88-foot-long replica canal schooner. Named for a great friend to LC MM and a magnanimous citizen of Vermont, Lois McClure was designed to provide a new window into the working-class world of these nineteenth-century freight haulers and the people who operated them. When the first archaeological example of a Lake Champlain sailing canal boat was found in 1980, this vessel type and the mariners who operated them had been all but forgotten. More than three decades of research , both underwater and in archives, now provide an understanding of these past equi valents of long-haul tractor-trailers and the society of mariners who operated them. Unlike today's trucker, canalers often traveled wirh rheir families, and rhe canal boars served as rheir homes. Our story begins just prior to 1823, the year the Champlain (or Northern) Canal was completed. This 63-mile New York State-funded canal permitted newlydesigned watercraft to pass between Lake Champlain and rhe Hudso n River, linking Champlain Valley products with Hudson Valley marketplaces and beyond through
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canal boats were transformed into towed canal boats. The sailing rig, which stepped on the deck, was removed and the centerboard raised to permit the canal boat to transit through the locks and canal to the Hudson River without transshipping irs cargo. In rhe early years, when steam towboats were few, their sailing rigs were often taken aboard and re-rigged upon reaching rhe Hudson , allowing rhem to sail to their destination. As time passed and steam towboats becam e more numerous, the rig was often stored ar a sail loft in Whitehall
(left) Map showing the regional waterways used by canal boats; (below) 1he canal schooner General Buder as she looks on the bottom ofLake Champlain. Drawing by Kevin Crisman; (above right) A canal schooner under sail on Lake Champlain, 1830.
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is found to answer all rhe uses intended." Thus began rhe life of a watercraft which allowed lake m erchants and captains to sail to rhe Champlain Canal entrance at Whitehall, New York, where the sailing
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rhe Port of New York. On Lake Champlain it triggered the beginning of the region's most dynamic commercial growth and, in conjunction wirh the Erie Canal completed just two years larer, ir established New York City as rhe most dynamic commercial harbor in rhe United States. Over the next century, canal boars, borh sailing vessels and the more numerous towed canal boats, were an everyday sighr on Lake Champlain. Even after rhe proliferation of railroads, canal boars continued to operate as rhe backbone of rhe region's commercial freight system . Wirh rhe completion of the Canadian Chambly Canal (1843), rhe Northern Waterway became a veritable maritime inrersrare system on which canalers regularly moved cargoes between New York C iry and Canada. At its height, there were thousands of towed canal boars and several hundred sailing canal boars in operation. By the time of the Grear Depression, the canal boat era was already over. A way of life soon faded into rhe pas r and our of memory. We now know that the Lake Champlain sailing canal boar was created concurrently with rhe opening of rhe Champlain Canal in 1823. In fact, the very first vessel to transit rhe newly-completed Champlain Canal in September of 1823 was Gleaner of Sr. Albans, Vermont. Described in an 1823 newspaper article, "The vessel [Gleaner] was built as an experiment and
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SEA HISTORY 111 , SUMMER 2005
21