Chimney Point

Chimney Point
Historic tavern at Chimney Point
Location in Vermont
Chimney Point
Basic data
Foundation :	1991
State :	United States
State :	Vermont
County :	Addison County
Coordinates :	44 ° 2 ′  N , 73 ° 25 ′  W Coordinates: 44 ° 2 ′  N , 73 ° 25 ′  W
Time zone :	Eastern ( UTC − 5 / −4 )
Height :	37 m
FIPS :	50-13900
GNIS ID :	1460402
Website :	www.historicsites.vermont.gov

Chimney Point is a peninsula on Lake Champlain and at the same time an unincorporated community in Addison County of the state of Vermont in the United States . The peninsula forms a bottleneck in the lake and is one of the earliest settlements in the Champlain Valley due to its strategic importance.

Chimney Point became a State Historic Site of Vermont says. This also includes a tavern from 1785 and in this place the history of three cultures, the Native American , the French colonial period and the early Americans, is preserved.

history

Native Americans

Archaeological Finds from Chimney Point

Archaeological finds show that groups of Indian peoples used this narrow section of Lake Champlain for trade and exchange for more than 7,500 years. In addition, there were good areas for hunting and fishing in the wetlands in the hinterland, as well as abundant material for the manufacture of tools and aids. They stayed here mostly seasonally. During the Woodland period , they made clay vessels for making and storing food.

French colonial times

Map section from 1779 of Lake Champlain with Chimney Point and Crown Point

The area around Lake Champlain was explored as the first European in 1609 by Samuel de Champlain , a French explorer and cartographer. On June 12, 1609 he reached Lake Champlain with 300 Wyandot warriors , whom he had promised support in their war against the Iroquois living in the south , and nine French soldiers. Some of the warriors had already turned back when they encountered a Mohawk war group . Champlain killed three mohawks with his arquebus . This created friendships and enmities between the French and the Indians that lasted for almost two hundred years.

Through his exploration, Champlain found an almost complete waterway between the St. Lawrence River and the Hudson River , which the Dutch explorer Henry Hudson used a little later in search of the Northwest Passage. He reached what is now Albany . At first neither the French nor the Dutch settled the Champlain Valley, but they traded fur with the Indians.

Iroquois used Lake Champlain as a route for their raids on English and French settlements in the Saint Lawrence River valley in the early seventeenth century. Attempts by the Jesuits to Christianize the Iroquois and to forge alliances with them failed because the Iroquois felt threatened by the Jesuits. Fortified outposts were built, but the Iroquois could not stop them. The Iroquois later allied with the English. Between 1664 and 1763, the French and Dutch fought with their allies for supremacy on Lake Champlain, which with its tributaries was an important water route. Several fortresses were built.

On the Chimney Point peninsula, in 1690 , Captain Jacobus de Warm from Albany, commissioned by the English governor of New York Francis Nicholson , built a small stone fort for defense, which was manned by 12 English and 30 Mohawk-Iroquois for about a month. The French King Louis XV. approved in 1731 the construction of a fort opposite the Fort of Crown Point on the east bank of Lake Champlain, the Pointe-à-la-Chevelure on Chimney Point. English colonists protested building on their territory, but the protest was ignored. A redoubt was built at Crown Point in 1734 , later named Fort Saint-Frédéric . This controlled the narrow point of Lake Champlain with Chimney Point on the east bank and thus the north-south trade on the lake. The land on the east bank of the lake, about the area of ​​today's Addison County , was given as a grant to Gilles Hocquart, the artistic director of New France in 1743 . In addition to the military facilities, there were also French settlers on both banks of Lake Champlain.

During the Seven Years' War in North America , the French made strategic use of their positions at Crown Point, Chimney Point and Fort Ticonderoga to the south . But the British general Jeffrey Amherst succeeded in attacking Fort Ticonderoga in the summer of 1759 and the French withdrew north. They destroyed Fort Saint-Frédéric so that the British could not use it and burned their houses on both sides of the lake. Only a chimney ((en) chimney) remained and gave the area on the east bank its name Chimney Point .

The British used massive earthworks to build Fort Crown Point on the ruins of Fort Saint-Frédéric . Already 15 years later, in 1773, there was a fire which caused the ammunition stored there to explode and this explosion destroyed Fort Crown Point . Only a small contingent of British soldiers remained.

American War of Independence

On behalf of the Colony of Connecticut , Ethan Allen attacked Fort Ticonderoga and, a little later, Fort Crown Point with two hundred Green Mountain Boys in 1775 . On the eve of the planned attack, Benedict Arnold reached Allen with a supreme commission of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety and wanted to take over the leadership of the force. After a heated argument, they agreed on a division of the command and were able to take Fort Ticonderoga. As a result, large quantities of ammunition and cannons that were brought directly to Boston ended up in the hands of the American Army. For about 18 months the bottleneck was under the control of the Americans and represented an important basis.

American troops were able to besiege Québec in the winter of 1775/1776, but after a reinforcement of the British troops reached Québec in the spring, the American troops had to give up the siege in May and withdraw to the south. Many of the soldiers were sick and died while retreating. At Chimney Point they could be cared for on both sides of Lake Champels.

At the Battle of Valcour in 1776, British troops seeking to regain sovereignty over Lake Champlain destroyed the defenses and houses at Crown Point and Chimney Point. They then took over the area and German auxiliary troops under the leadership of Friedrich Adolf Riedesel camped on their way in Chimney Point. Thereafter, the area was no longer touched during the war.

Connection to Crown Point

Bridge from 1929

Bridge from 2011

After the end of the War of Independence, Benjamin Paine built a tavern in Chimney Point and from 1785 a ferry service was established. A ferry with sail crossed to Crown Point and later to Port Henry , New York. The tavern was sold to the Barnes family in 1821. They modernized the ferry and had it pulled by horses. This made the connection faster and less dependent on wind and weather. From 1890 the horses were replaced by steam engines. And in 1929 the Lake Champlain Bridge was built.

The bridge from 1929 had to be closed in 2009 because it showed severe damage. A new bridge was built and inaugurated in 2011. In the meantime, the connection with ferries has been maintained.

Chimney Point State Historic Site

The Chimney Point area was bought by the state of Vermont in 1966 and has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1971 . The tavern has been restored and has been a museum since 1991. Crown Point has also been listed on the National Register and the two are working together in an effort to preserve the history of the Lake Champels bottleneck.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Chimney Point in the United States Geological Survey's Geographic Names Information System , accessed August 9, 2017.
2. ↑ Chimney Point | Historic Sites. In: vermont.gov. historicsites.vermont.gov, accessed August 9, 2017 . 
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Spanning the Decades, The Lake Champlain Bridge Story (PDF) , accessed August 9, 2017.
4. ↑ David Hackett Fischer: Champlain's Dream . Simon and Schuster, New York 2008, ISBN 978-1-4165-9332-4 .
5. ^ ^{A b c d e} History of Lake Champlain: Contact Period. In: lcmm.org. Retrieved August 11, 2017 . 
6. ^ ^{A b} History of Lake Champlain: Revolutionary War. In: lcmm.org. Retrieved August 11, 2017 . 
7. ↑ Chimney Point | Historic Sites. In: vermont.gov. historicsites.vermont.gov, accessed August 11, 2017 . 

Web links

Commons : Chimney Point State Historic Site  - Collection of pictures, videos, and audio files

• Chimney Point State Historic Site