Vermont Public
Radio Commentary
by Chester H. Liebs
© 1999 by
Chester H. Liebs
Made possible by: The Alma Gibbs Donchian
Foundation and the Preservation Trust of Vermont
A Lake
Champlain Shoreline Mystery
Lake Champlain’s underwater heritage of shipwrecks has
received much well-deserved attention recently. However there
are many important historic sites at the edge of the water as
well. Since the millennium’s fast upon us, I though I’d
recount the discovery of an particularly haunting place along
the Lake-- a mysterious time -capsule-of-history from our own
vanishing century.
I came upon it by accident one summer day, in the late 1980s,
when looking at lakefront property in Grand Isle county. The
real-estate agent guided her car along busy Route 2 as we
crossed the stone causeway atop Malletts bay. After climbing a
long hill we veered off the highway and cut across a field along
a small rutted road with grass growing up the middle.
As we reached the edge of a thick grove of trees, this faint
trace mysteriously metamorphosed into a wider road heading down
a steep bank to the shore. My antennae as a detective of places
began arching and sparking. This was not your ordinary driveway.
It was quite substantial and heavily reinforced by that
brown-colored concrete used for building highways, railway
bridges and factories earlier this century. “Why this road
could support a convoy of heavily loaded trucks” I thought.
At the end of this peculiar driveway was an even stranger
house--large, rambling, two-stories, with a roof of many pointy
gables. It had been deserted for some time. Inside, while the
realtor extolled the fact that I could sell off some of the
surrounding property to finance the building’s renovation, I
was transfixed by a strange room, entered through a thick steel
door like a bank vault.
We then stepped outside and walked a few feet to the shore.
There, mounted on a masonry base, at the head of the rather
secluded cove rimming the property, was the remains of a round
glass search light, its once bright brass case oxidized to a
dull grey green. This appeared once to have been a very powerful
light capable of drilling its beam through the thickest
fog--perhaps clear to the opposite shore. I wondered what had
once been docking here at night to require such a dazzling
luminescent greeting?
My eyes glanced right and I realized I might be looking at
the answer. There, a short way off, was the remains of a
wood-frame boathouse. Long and rather narrow, it had not been
the home of your typical pleasure boat. Hum it must have been
built for something very long, sleek and fast--a boat that could
speed through the water for many hours while gobbling up a lot
of fuel. I made this deduction as my eyes glanced up the hill
and focused on a large shed. Inside was a huge rusting
fuel-storage tank and a coil of rotting hose long enough to
reach down to the water.
As we headed back to the car, rather than dreaming of how I
could fix up a vacation home, my mind was busily processing all
the strange clues to the mystery I had just seen. Was the
massive concrete entrance way merely evidence of a former owner
with the means to reinforce a driveway, to prevent erosion for
the next thousand years? Did he or she have valuables that they
needed to protect in a room built like a vault? Were there a lot
of visitors by boat at night, in foggy weather, so that a
powerful searchlight was needed to guide them? Did one-time
residents have a weakness for speeding up and down the lake in a
long, fast boat, and the money to keep it housed and fueled....
Or had I stumbled upon a series of clues relating to a
clandestine aspect of Lake Champlain’s early-20th-century
history-- one resulting from the only amendment to the
constitution that was ever repealed? A time of a new revival of
lake trade, illegal but often overlooked by local authorities,
when fast boats brought booze from Canada where it was legal,
south to the States, during the era of Prohibition?
Credit: Author, and observer of the everyday landscape,
Chester Liebs is Professor Emeritus of History and Founder of
the Historic Preservation Program at the University of Vermont.
