The Steamboats
In 1809, two years after the Clermont, the brothers Winans launched a black vessel that looked like a canal boat with a smokestack and ran her between Whitehall and St Johns. She was the second commercial steamboat in the world to enter regular service, and for the next hundred and twenty-one years there was almost always a steamboat on this lake. In 1930 the company that owned nearly all of them printed a book listing every one.
Here is that list, drawn. Each bar is a vessel, from the year she entered service to the year she left it; the bar's thickness is her tonnage. Click one.
READ THE BOOK → BEFORE THE STEAMBOATS: THE WAR ROAD →Every one of them anybody pictured
Ross printed a portrait of fourteen of the twenty-nine and of none of the early boats: the first ones ran before anybody here was making pictures of boats. But the companies advertised them, and the advertisements carried woodcuts: four of those cuts, printed between 1817 and 1830, are the only likenesses that exist of the Phoenix, the Champlain, the Congress, the Phoenix II, the Franklin and the General Greene. The last of those is a printer’s stock block, set over her name. For eight more the only picture is one that was made rather than found, and every one of those states as much beneath it; the Water Witch has two, under steam and under sail. Every vessel in the book now has a face. Click a picture for the vessel, or the picture again to see it full size.
Where six of them stopped, and where thirteen hulls actually are
Most were retired, dismantled or sold off to a railroad. Six ended at a place the book names — burned at a dock, sunk on a reef, on the rocks in a gale. These are those places, not surveyed wreck positions: the book gives a place name and nothing finer. Where the statistical table and the narrative name different landmarks, both are quoted; in the Phoenix's case they are the same water anyway, Colchester Reef lying about a quarter of a mile north of Providence Island.
The four in Shelburne Bay are a different kind of claim. Ross states only that they were retired; they are on the bottom off Shelburne Shipyard, and they have been surveyed. They are drawn as one mark because they are one site — four hulls lying together in about ten feet (3 m) of water — and the section below sets out which is which and how each was named.
The hollow rings are a different thing again: nine wrecks that divers go down to, plotted where the hull is rather than where a writer said it went down. Two of them are boats this map already places from the book, and where both exist a dashed line joins them, 5.2 km (3.2 miles) for the Phoenix and 5.2 km for the Champlain II. Neither end of those lines is wrong: Ross named the water a boat sank in, and was not giving anybody a fix. The other six are not in his book at all, because he wrote about steamboats and these are the working craft the steamboats towed: a horse ferry, three canal boats, a coal barge, and a boat carrying quarried stone. This is Vermont’s Underwater Historic Preserve program, nine sites; it is not a census of the lake’s wrecks, which run to several hundred.
The nine you can dive
Shelburne Shipyard
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Four eras
They are the author's own divisions, not mine. What the timeline shows is how sharp the third one is: between 1837 and 1875 the boats roughly triple in tonnage and stop being replaced every eight years, because by then a steamboat was a railway's feeder rather than the fastest way to move anything.