Here’s an interesting little treat for the military history buff: an underwater portion of a bridge crossing Lake Champlain to the famed Fort Ticonderoga has floated to the surface and been recovered.
For more than two centuries, the waters of Lake Champlain have hidden the remains of a marvel of 18th-century engineering — a bridge built by 2,500 sick and hungry Continental soldiers.
Now a piece of that bridge sits in the preservation laboratory at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum, destined to give visitors a portal into revolutionary times.
“When you look at what they wanted to do, it connects you right to the American Revolution,” said the museum’s executive director, Art Cohn.
Historians say the bridge was constructed in March and April 1777. Thousands of huge pine logs were skidded onto the ice and notched together. Weighed down with rocks, these caissons sunk to the lake bottom through holes the soldiers cut in the ice.
By spring 22 caissons, some up to 50 feet tall, reached the lake’s surface. They were joined by a 16-foot-wide deck that linked Fort Ticonderoga in New York and Mount Independence in Vermont.
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If the part of the bridge above the water was destroyed, the part under the surface was not. The caissons were set so deep that they did not interfere with boats on the lake.
The bridge was largely forgotten until 1983, until divers discovered the caissons, still largely intact, laid out in an arc between the two shores.
Cohn and others began to study the bridge more intensely in 1992, mapping the locations of the caissons and recovered thousands of Revolutionary War artifacts believed dumped in the lake when the British abandoned the fortifications in late 1777. Some of those artifacts are now on display at the Mount Independence Visitor Center in Orwell.
Then, last year, a 26-foot beam estimated to weigh between 1,500 and 1,800 pounds surfaced and was pulled to shore near Fort Ticonderoga.
The story gives a little more information on the roles that the bridge and the fort played in the war. It goes on to discuss the preservation efforts and plans for display. Go read and enjoy if you find these types of things as intriguing as I do.