Steamboats on Lake Champlain, a brief history

Steamboats on Lake Champlain, a brief history

When Thompson’s Point became a magnet for the summer cottages of the leading businessmen of the area, thanks in no small part to a major dock facility, they would commute to work and return to their camps aboard the Chateaugay and then the Ticonderoga, which were among the first steel-hulled steamboats on the lake, or in other small steamers and naphtha-powered steam launches that brought campers back and forth to Vergennes, Burlington or Westport, N.Y. By 1895, one of the occupants was Justice D. J. Brewer of the U.S. Supreme Court. President Theodore Roosevelt visited Thompson’s Point in 1902 as a guest aboard Dr. William Seward Webb’s steam yacht, the Elfrida.