What the Lake Carried
This lake was a commercial corridor for two hundred years before it was scenery, and the story of that is well told. The numbers are harder to come by. This page charts the one series the site can build from its own shelf, sets out the narrative the literature supports, and is straight about the series at the center of the subject that it could not find.
The hole in the middle of the subject
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The one series this site can draw
Ross tabled twenty-eight steamers in 1878 — build year, tonnage, length, horsepower and cost — and his book is already in the reader here. Plotted rather than listed, the table states something its columns do not.
—heavier, 1809 to 1906
—more expensive
—more powerful
Every vessel indexed to the Vermont of 1809, on a log scale. All
three lines start together by construction; what matters is how far they come apart. Capacity and
capital roughly keep pace with each other. Power leaves both behind — which is what a passenger
and mail trade does when it can hear a railway coming, and it is not visible in the tonnage column
alone.
Six beats the literature supports
Four booms, each with its collapse
Every figure here keeps the caveat its source came with, on the line rather than in a footnote.
Bloomery forges, Clinton and Essex counties. Twelve years. The iron boom
did not taper — it went.