| The History Project |
Otter Creek |
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In Addison County there is a creek that is called Otter Creek. It drains an area almost 1,000 square miles. It's called "Indian Road" because the Iroquois and Abanakies would use it as a highway back in the 1800's. They would use it to travel to get to flats , and open meadows. When they get to the meadows they would hunt and go picking berries. They would mostly hunt deer along the creek banks. 
There were 1,000 Indian sites in the state of Vermont, but only 400 of them were along Otter creek and its tributaries. A lot of the sites are at the mouth going into Lake Champlain. As settlers began to fill the area under the falls in Vergennes, they built factories to build ships.They built the ships for the wars on Lake Champlain. Under the Vergennes water falls there were a lot of ships manufactured there. They picked the falls for manufacturing plant because they would use the water for there water source, and it was a big enough bay to launch the boats out to Lake Champlain. Now here are a couple of ships that came from the factory under the falls, their names are the Commodore Macdonoughs,and the Eagle.TheCommodore was built during the war of 1812 it was also launched there. It was one of Benedict Arnold's ships. The other ship was the Eagle.It was launched August 11, 1814. This ship was a 100 foot gun boat. Nineteen days after it was sent out to battle it was shot and had a hole in the keel, it had to go back to the factory for repairs, the it went back to fight the battle. |
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. Ships of Lake Champlain |
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The BATTLE OF VALCOUR ISLAND was the British against the Americans. Two of Benedict Arnold's ships were the Washington Galley and the Philadelphia, launched in the summer of 1776 and sunk October 11,1776. It was midday and the smell of war in the air. The first cannon was fired then the war broke out, ships were getting shot at. One of them being the Philadelphia.It started sinking; the Washington Galley came up aside the sinking ship and the men got on and by the evening the Philadelphia was gone.
The Philadelphia was later raised in 1935, the mast and cannon were still intact. The original was built in Skenesborough outfitted at Fort Ticonderoga. Ben Rue was the captain. It was a flat bottom ship. There were twenty-two crew members. some of the things that were found on the ship are an anchor, a cannon, a leather shoe, buttons, and an hourglass. When the ship was brought up it was a major attraction for people to see. "The chief actors in the drama of the recovering of the ship were J. Ruppert Schalk, diver William Lilja, and Colonel Lorenzo F. Hagglund." The ship is now in the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., where it is being preserved. |
| by Mark Bienvenue and Kevin Reed |
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