Out of Lake Champlain and into the Champlain Canal

After a week and a half of wandering around in Lake Champlain, we've headed south.  Last night we spent the night in Whitehall, New York, which claims to be the birthplace of the United States Navy.  This is the town where they built the boats Benedict Arnold used in the Battle of Valcour Island, the first naval battle of the Revolutionary War.  Unfortunately, Benedict lost nine of his fifteen ships, including his flagship, but we try not to focus on the bad stuff.  Now Whitehall is a small, depressed little town with no economy and few residents, but they have a great jazz band.  I'm not sure where the band came from but they had a concert in the park next to the town dock last night and those guys were good!  They were young guys, could have been the high school or community college jazz band.

On our way down the lower end of Lake Champlain, we stopped in Chipman's Point to visit Fort Ticonderoga.  We stayed at a marina that lent us a car to go to the Fort.  Many marinas are like that, they simply give you the keys to a car and trust you to bring it back.  Of course, they have your $250K boat in their marina so I guess they don't feel that lending you a junker worth maybe $3,000 is a big risk.

Ft. Ticonderoga from the water

Fort Ticonderoga is built overlooking the southern end of Lake Champlain.  Strategically, controlling this point keeps the bad guys from invading by water from either the north or the south, depending on where your enemies are.  The French built the first fort here, to keep the British south of the lake.  When Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain boys took it over in 1775, the objective was to keep the British bottled up in the north.

View from the Fort

As you can see the fort sits high over the lake, making it a perfect point from which to shell enemy boats.  The fort had 100 guns even though there were only 40 soldiers stationed here when the American Revolution started.  But it never shelled anyone.  Ethan Allen seized it May 10, 1775 and in January, 1776, an enterprising young man named Henry Knox offered to bring the guns from Ticonderoga to Boston to help break the British control of Boston.  After the guns were removed, the fort never played another role in the revolution. By the 1820s it had fallen into complete disrepair.  It only exists today because a wealthy family bought the property to build a summer home and decided to restore the fort.

We're about half way through the eleven locks of the Champlain Canal.  By the middle of the week we'll be back in Waterford, NY and ready to go back through the Erie Canal.  Slowly but surely the summer is drawing to a close.