While your Lake Discovery Cruise is docked in Vergennes, take some time to visit the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum featuring a variety of seasonal and permanent exhibits.

Fish Stories
All Season 2008

Join us for an innovative exhibit that tells the stories of a number of Lake Champlain’s eighty-one fish species – through a fish-eye lens. We learn from the perspective of the fishes both well known and rare. Explore the changing habitats of the lake from glacial lake to salt water sea to modern-day waterway linked to other lakes and rivers by man-made canals and challenged by changes in human land use. Learn more about some unique fish such as bowfin which can live outside water for short periods of time; long-nose gar which is like a mini alligator; and lamprey – which, despite its ill repute, is a native species and has the most unique mouth structure of any fish in the lake. This unique exhibit includes paintings by local artists; recordings of “fishing stories” by seasoned Lake Champlain anglers; descriptions of Abenaki and Iroquois fishing practices; and examples of fishing equipment used over the centuries.

Maritime Machines
All Season 2008

This exhibit includes a series of interactive stations all around the museum that give visitors an opportunity to experience first-hand the ways that people have combined and refined simple maritime machines over the centuries.

This year’s exhibits will include:

• A frictionless Sail Table- Visitors can view the workings of sails and sail rigs.
• A Steam Engine from the Steamboat Comet- Built in 1893 on Lake Champlain’s Juniper Island.
• Windlass- A fun exhibit, where visitors work together to move a heavy block of stone across the museum grounds.
• Working Bilge Pumps- Scale-model Waterwheel powering a miniature sawmill and grist mill.
• Series of Bos’n’s Chairs where visitors can lift themselves up off of the ground.
• Rowboat that indicates the rower’s progress across the lake.

Lake Champlain Thru the Lens
September 1—October 14

View Lake Champlain’s’ many seasons as they are beautifully reflected in this exhibit of outstanding work by professional and amateur photographers. Museum visitors vote for the “People’s Choice Award.”

Permanent Exhibits:

Lake Champlain: A Porthole to History

Dive into the nation’s best preserved and best documented collection of shipwrecks! This exhibit hosts 200 shipwrecks collected from a sonar survey of the lake. In this exhibit, nautical archaeologists decipher the histories of some of the most unusual and dramatic shipwrecks in the lake.

View the following:

• A Horse Powered Ferry
• Vermont I- the world’s second most successful experiment in steam powered navigation the tragic fire that sank the steamboat
• Phoenix- A Steamboat struck by a tragic fire in 1819 (who’s name is now honored as a state room name aboard Moonlight Lady)
• General Butler- This ship ran aground on the Burlington Breakwater during a winter storm, in 1862.

Revolutionary War Gunboat Replica Philadelphia II

Come aboard the 54 ft. long Philadelphia II, a full-sized replica of a gunboat. This boat is from the American fleet that confronted the British Royal Navy on Lake Champlain in 1776. The original Philadelphia, which sank on the first day of the Battle of Valcour Island, was raised from the lake in 1935 and is now at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C. The replica, constructed by LCMM staff and volunteers between 1989–91, is moored at the museum’s North Harbor, offering visitors a hands-on experience with the eighteenth century boat.

Small Watercraft Collection & Boat Building in the Champlain Valley
View the museum’s collection of over 75 historic watercraft built or used on Lake Champlain. Permanent and rotating exhibits interpret a wide variety of boats, including dugouts, a 1609-era birchbark canoes, rowing craft, and many types of small sailing vessels that once plied the waters of Lake Champlain.

Key to Liberty Revolutionary War Exhibit
Eyewitness accounts describe 1776 Battle of Valcour Island, and the fate of the vessels of the small American fleet that dared to confront the British Royal Navy on Lake Champlain. Model ships, hands-on learning stations, videos, artifacts, historical maps and images tell the story of Benedict Arnold’s 1776 fleet. A video "Key to Liberty" brings to life the crucial moments during the Battle of Valcour Island. Another video documentary “A Tale of Three Gunboats” presents the raising of the original 1776 gunboat Philadelphia from Lake Champlain in 1935, the construction and launching of the replica gunboat Philadelphia II in 1989–1991, and LCMM’s 1997 discovery of the last missing gunboat, Spitfire.

Life Aboard a Canal Boat
For 150 years, until they were supplanted by railroads, trucking, and airplanes, canal boats transformed communities, commerce, and culture in the northeastern United States. Enjoy a “virtual tour” of schooner Lois McClure, and the latest archaeological findings from historic shipwrecks. Three hundred artifacts recovered from the Sloop Island Canal Boat in 2002-03 provide a glimpse of daily life on board a canal boat during the time from 1820-1940. Peer through a window into the past, through the remarkably complete contents of the cabin where family and crew lived.

Steamboat Preservation
Robert Fulton operated the world’s first successful steamboat on the Hudson River, two hundred years ago. The following year, the Winans brothers launched the first steamboat on Lake Champlain, Vermont, and ushered in the Age of Steam Navigation. The lake’s 29 large steamboats, and a host of smaller steam-powered ferries and launches served the lake’s waterfront communities and captured the public imagination.

Blacksmith Arts Center
Tour the new Blacksmith Arts Center, built in celebration of the beauty and historical importance of blacksmithing. The craft was perhaps the most important skill to Lake Champlain communities for two centuries. Slated to open in mid-June of 2008, the building will be dedicated to blacksmithing education, and include a state-of-the art blacksmith shop for fabrication of hardware for replica vessels and historic museums throughout the country.

View Lake Champlain Maritime Museum Special Events

To Reserve: info@vermontdiscoverycruises.com or call 802-863-3350