Did You Know? Ticonderoga Part 5: The Ticonderoga in Winter
The VT Folklife Archive is full of amazing first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England–past and present. In this feature, we share these stories with you.
Well, last month we thought we were concluding our four-part series on the Ticonderoga, but there were just too many good stories about the Ti left untold. So this month with cold weather setting in here in Vermont, we're adding one more set of stories about the Ticonderoga in winter–a time when the work changed to fit the needs of the season. We'll hear from former deckhands Dick Derry and Jerry Aske about their memories of the special care and maintenance of the Ti during the winter months.
First, Jerry Aske talks about the challenge of winter maintenance before there were "dry docks" for boat maintenance--using real horsepower! It's amazing to learn about the specialized knowledge these workers needed to have to tell if the lines holding the boat were holding steady.
Jerry: Before my time, but not too long before my time, all of the steamboats would be berthed here at the shipyard. This was their winter berth, and they'd tie up these various docks around here and then when they were tied up and they'd freeze in, they would erect scaffolding on the ice, so that they could, on nice days, they could paint and scrape and do whatever they had to do on the outside of the hull. And then I suppose on colder days, they'd work inside. But there was a lot of maintenance had to be done and the wintertime was the time to do it. And nowadays of course you want to fix a hull, you haul it out in dry dock. But back then the dry dock consisted of a skid, greased skid railway, powered by seven capstans that were powered by horses. And then the slack was taken up on seven smaller capstans that were operated by manpower. And with all of these blocks and tackle and everything, they had to keep all the lines, the same tension, they had to keep the rails greased. Fred Barrett told me that they sometimes would snap every one of the lines before they got a boat out of the water. And woe be to the person who happened to be straddling one of those lines when it snapped. So, it was dangerous as well. He said they used to go between the lines constantly with a steel rod and give it a whack, and they could tell by the sound that the tension was the same on each one. And sometimes it could take up to a good work week to get a vessel out of the water. And so that's why they worked on them off of the ice. And they only hauled them out every so often, for inspection. Obviously, they had to paint the bottom of the hull, eventually, also they had to be inspected for rust and so forth. Then in 1929, the Champlain Transportation Company had the Crandall Engineering Company from Boston install the marine railway that's there now. It was steam powered when we came here. Now it's electric powered. But the machinery is the same. And it's on rollers, let's put it that way. And the cradle itself can be adjusted for any vessel up to twelve hundred ton, by the way. And so after that was installed, they could haul the boats out more frequently, so they didn't have to work off the ice and so forth. And now it's that particular railway is used for the ferry boat company. But just about the time that they installed that modern railway, was almost the end of the, well 1929, you know what happened then.
View of the Marine Railway building at Shelburne Shipyard with some of its machinery. Erected 1929 for the Champlain Transportation Company. Photo by L.L. McCallister. University of Vermont Libraries. Special Collections.
View of the steamboat Vermont III on the cradle at the Shelburne Shipyard just a the water's edge of Lake Champlain. The boat is perhaps being maneuvered into dry dock. Photo by L.L. McCallister. University of Vermont Libraries. Special Collections.
Next, we hear from Dick Derry. Dick grew up around the boats and remembers some of the special care that was taken in the 1940's and the special tools that were used in the winter to protect the boats.
Dick: Basically in the heyday of the railroads there were two railroads. The Rutland on this side of Lake Champlain and the Delaware-Hudson on the other side. And connecting the 2 railroads across the lake for trade and transportation, movement of goods, people and so forth, were the steamboats. So the two railroads and the system of steamboats connecting up the two was the basic infrastructure of the early transportation system and it brought about the Champlain Transportation Co. that built the Ticonderoga,
And, well, several of the steamboats, and the ones that I am familiar with three, the Ticonderoga, the Chateauguay and the Vermont. And as a child they were parked in my front dooryard… And all the boats were deactivated as a child and they more or less functioned like a–some kids have treehouses; we had the three steamboats that were our treehouses. We swam off them and we ran through them, and we probably did a lot of mischief. We didn't break up anything, but they were great to run around in and get out in the paddlewheels and spear fish, and of course we'd swim off them and those were fond memories of the very early days at Shelburne Harbor… And by then [1940], I can just recall the cold winter with the three boats stored there at the harbor, the main chore it seemed was to just keep the deck shoveled off during the winter. This crew of four or five men would just spend either cutting a channel around the boats, and in those days to keep the ice from crushing them, there was about a mile of channel that was cut, an actual open waterway. It was about four or five feet wide, and ran right around the harbor, the boats within it. And that prevented the expanding ice from crushing the hulls. And on cold weather when you got through cutting it, you just went back at the other end and started cutting again. That was a cold job. And if you weren't doing that, you were shoveling snow off the top decks of the boats. The men made special shovels out of wood to do that job so that they wouldn't hurt the canvas decks. All these memories come swishing back here. [Laughs]
Jane: What kind of shovels did they used then?
Dick: They were a long-handled shovel. I would say that they were probably sixteen inches deep and only about a foot wide. And they didn't have sides on them. It was kind of an idea, kind of chunking up a piece of snow, almost like you'd make an igloo out of, and then throwing it over the side. And the main, the thing that fascinated me when I first saw this was why are you using wooden shovels. And of course, obviously to not hurt the decks.
In the 1940's, the boats were left in the water for the winter. However, from the early 1950's, Jerry Aske has memories of the process of getting the Ti up onto a beach for the winter. In particular, Captain Marty Fisher had an ingenious way to beach the boat!
Jerry: But as kids we used to play on it, Luke Barrett–which was one of the Barrett family that is well known in the shipyard circles–and I used to, we were the only kids out here so that was kind of a place for us to play. A great place for cops and robbers and hide and seek and from the boiler room to the turtle deck. When Marty used to bring the boat in, we always tried to be on deck for the fall layup, because he'd come right in front of the house here, which at that time the Barretts lived here. He'd come next to the dock down here and then when, when he was oh, maybe fifty yards from shore, he'd signal reverse, and of course this would, these paddle wheels would wash the water way up almost to the house. And the boat would keep coming in, slowing down, of course, but coming in. And, and the bow would take advantage of this surge of water. So, then when, when the boat settled down and you gave a toot on the whistle, it was beached for the winter, when the water went out from this kind of paddlewheel-made tidal wave, the boat was high and dry as far as the bow was concerned. The bow was stuck on the beach. So, it didn't go anywhere. It didn't wiggle around. And of course, in the spring, the water always came up, so she floated free.
Vermonters have always been very creative when it comes to living in–and with–winter conditions, and the care of the Ti in winter shows that ingenuity. Next month, we'll begin a series of "Did You Know" articles from our archives looking at other creative ways that Vermonters have managed during the winter months.