Lake Champlain Transportation history

By 1833, there were 232 cargo- and passenger-carrying canal boats registered at towns along Lake Champlain and the canal.

Finally, in January 1835, the CTC acquired a monopoly on Lake Champlain steamboat ferry service, which it maintained until the end of the steamer era.

The Water Witch foundered and then sank in 1840.

The use of the sailing canal boat increased after 1841, when Burlington businessmen Timothy Follett and John Bradley formed the Merchants Lake Boat Line.

The opening of the Chambly Canal around the rapids of the Richelieu River in 1843 also boosted the economy of the Champlain Valley.

Ground was broken in 1846 for the Vermont Central, the State's first railroad, at its headquarters in Northfield.

The Delaware and Hudson Railroad bought the Champlain Transportation Company in 1870.

As early as 1890, a popular day excursion from Burlington was to Ausable Chasm, New York, first by steamboat to Port Kent, then to this river gorge, three miles away, on the Peanut Train.

On April 18, 1906, the Ticonderoga’s launching was witnessed by thousands of people gathered at the Shelburne Shipyard.

Fort Frederick was officially opened on July 4, 1912.

Then in August of 1919, the Ticonderoga ran aground on Point Au Fer Reef, 18 miles north of Plattsburgh.

She was sold to the Tocony-Palmyra Ferry Company of Philadelphia and put into service on the Delaware River under the new name, “Mount Holly”. In 1927, she went further north, to New York Harbor.

In 1929 the Champlain Bridge, the first permanent highway bridge to span Lake Champlain, was constructed between Crown Point, New York, and Chimney Point, Vermont.

The westerly side of the Shelburne Shipyard, looking toward the Adirondacks, is the location my grandmother, Violet Martin Reeves, and a house guest drove to the summer of 1935.

By 1937, after 67 years, it sold the Champlain Transportation Company.

On May 5, 1938, the expanding Chesapeake Bay Ferry Company purchased her.

In August of 1948, he bought my family’s 234-acre waterfront farm on Lake Road in Charlotte, known as the Murphy Farm.

The first span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge opened in the summer of 1952, and the State of Maryland ceased its ferryboat operations.

The Lake Champlain Transportation Company, of Burlington Vermont, purchased her in 1954.

In 1955, the Ticonderoga, a symbol of the bygone days of travel around the lake with tourist stops along the way, was moved overland to the Shelburne Museum.

Lake Champlain Transportation purchased the City of Hampton in November of 1957, and made arrangements for her to be towed from Norfolk, Virginia and Waterford, New York.

In 1973, the main deck was widened to accommodate larger trucks.

The Raymond C. Pecor Jr. is named after the previous owner of Lake Champlain Transportation, Ray Pecor Jr., who acquired LCT in 1976.

Over the next several years, the trucks became longer, and in 1995 the Grand Isle was sailed to Panama City Florida where a local shipyard cut her in half and installed a 38-foot mid body and reconfigured her superstructure.

The Adirondack is the oldest, in service, double-ended American ferryboat of all time! On January 15, 2013, the “Adi” will celebrate her 100th birthday.