‘Fragments’ Brings the Battle of Valcour Island to Life

For many decades Lake Champlain was a great souvenir shop. Free for the taking, lengths of wood, cannonballs, lead bullets, silver spoons, iron chunks, rotting boat hulls — even human bones — were extracted from the lake’s northern reaches by relic hunters. These remnants of a battle 250 years ago were visible in shallow water, buried in mud and clay, bullets embedded in buildings. Shipwreck fragments, washed and polished, were made into canes and boat models and displayed on mantels like family photographs.

One shipwreck “was subjected to over a century and a half of looting and tampering by residents of Champlain Valley,” Carrigan Rose Miller wrote in a 2018 master’s thesis at Texas A&M University. Pickers, Miller found, bragged to area newspapers that they owned a bit of history — physical pieces of the American Revolution.

What they couldn’t know was that their keepsakes would hamper a subsequent effort to re-create a naval battle between a nascent America and Great Britain, a consequential clash little known outside the Champlain Valley. The Battle of Valcour Island, which the Americans lost just three months after the signing of Declaration of Independence in 1776, is now regarded as a key moment in the Revolution.

The cannonball that sank the *Philadelphia* Credit: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution

The relics, many of which were later donated to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, would also help preserve the tales of unsung farm boys who fought and died in the three-day conflict — men who deserve recognition as heroes just as much as the eight Minutemen who died at Lexington Common after “the shot heard ’round the world.”

As the Champlain Valley commemorates the 250th anniversary of the battle this weekend, Valcour is being remembered in a new light: not as a collection of boat shards or bios of naval commanders, but rather stories of ordinary citizens who risked their lives for a new nation. Those stories come to life in “Fragments: Voices of the American Revolution on Lake Champlain,” a new exhibit at the maritime museum that combines the science of underwater archaeology with meticulous archival research.

“The analogy I often make here is, it’s like a crime scene,” said Chris Sabick, the museum’s executive director. “Archaeology is all about the context of the artifacts that you find. So mapping their location is at least as important as the things you find themselves.

*Philadelphia* in 1935 Credit: Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution

“You can find a cannonball — that’s cool; it’s a cannonball,” he went on. “If you start picking up clues and taking them away, you’re losing the story of what actually happened here.”

The Battle of Valcour left eight American boats at the bottom of Lake Champlain. Gen. Benedict Arnold’s flagship, Royal Savage, and the gunboat Philadelphia were lost near Valcour Island, just south of Plattsburgh, N.Y. The Spitfire went down near Schuyler Island off Port Kent, N.Y. Five more, including the Congress, sank in what now is called Arnold’s Bay in Panton. There they sat for 69 years.

Amateur excavation began in 1845 when N.B. Proctor, who operated a shipyard near Red Rocks in South Burlington, tried to raise the Royal Savage using a stump puller. He ripped off a section of the hull, and the wood was made into handles for horse whips. Others used grappling and gaff hooks to raise timbers that were made into canes, according to Miller. By 1901, gun carriages, cannonballs, muskets, cutlery, shoes and human bones had been found.

By 1933 the wreck was so well known that college boys took turns diving with a rope to raise timbers. Bernard Hubenet and a friend jury-rigged a diving helmet with a Model T gas tank, a washing machine window and a garden hose to retrieve metal spikes and grapeshot — a caper that “showed that truly anyone could visit and tamper with the site,” Miller wrote.

What was left of the schooner was finally raised in 1934 by Lorenzo Hagglund, who owned a salvage company. But after years of failing to find a patron to preserve and display the ship — by then basically a pile of lumber — it was granted to the U.S. Navy History and Heritage Command in Washington, D.C., where small models of Arnold’s flagship have been made.

“The Last Gunboat,” a painting of the *Spitfire* by Ernest Haas

After the sorry end of the Royal Savage, massive looting in Arnold’s Bay and recreational scuba diving that opened Lake Champlain’s treasures to anyone, the 1987 Abandoned Shipwreck Act brought an end to unchecked finders keepers by clarifying regulatory control over shipwrecks.

Hagglund discovered the Philadelphia, the oldest surviving vessel from the battle, in pristine condition off Valcour Island in 1935. The drama of finding history intact during his dive fills his diary.

“Now let us climb over the gunwale and explore the interior, carefully, lest we break some object that may give us a message from the crew of ’76,” he later wrote in a 24-page booklet, “A Page From the Past,” published in 1936.

Unlike souvenir hunters who ravaged many Battle of Valcour wrecks, Hagglund collected 721 artifacts, from pewter spoons and bayonets to the ship itself. After wrapping the hull in canvas and floating the ship to the surface, Hagglund turned the ship into a tourist attraction, charging visitors 25 cents to see the boat, funds he used to help maintain it while he looked for an institution to display and preserve it.

The gunboat was offered to the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art, but UVM couldn’t find the money for a building to house it. After the city of Philadelphia turned it down, Hagglund kept the ship in a shed in Willsboro, N.Y. Finally, in 1961, Hagglund’s widow sold it to the Smithsonian for a reported $40,000, the amount she estimated Hagglund had spent over the years. In 1964 the hull and many artifacts were installed in a new wing of the National Museum of American History. A full-scale replica of the ship is on display at the museum in Vergennes.

The Spitfire, found in 1997 with its mast still erect, remains on the lake’s floor. Digital images taken by an underwater drone show a ship that looks eerily ready to sail again. The maritime museum has written an elaborate $44 million plan to raise, conserve and display the boat.

The centerpiece of the “Fragments” exhibit is a big salvaged cannon with a riveting history.

Gunboat *General Arnold*, a replica Credit: Courtesy

In summer 1999, a scuba-diving New York State policeman trained in underwater accident investigation dove below the surface of Lake Champlain off Valcour’s Indian Point — the easternmost position of the American fleet during the battle.

“I really didn’t know much about the battle. I just went out there and did a little metal detecting,” Ed Scollon told Seven Days. Using 10-foot PVC pipe as a probe, he pushed through four feet of clay and found what appeared to be the barrel of a cannon. He put his hands around the muzzle and could feel that the cannon had been broken off from its nether parts at the trunnions, the parts that adjust the cannon’s elevation. He wanted to raise it to keep it out of the hands of scavengers. But when he called Art Cohn, a founder of the maritime museum, he learned that moving the cannon barrel was against the law.

Meanwhile at a Massachusetts library, three months before Scollon found the broken cannon and unbeknownst to anyone in Vermont, a retired computer programmer and history teacher turned landscaper had been scrolling through the handwritten U.S. pension applications of Revolutionary War soldiers, preserved on microfilm. As a hobby, George Quintal Jr. had read through 2,200 of the 2,700 rolls since 1980. Each roll contains 80 names. Perhaps one in 100 contained a story “worth pursuing” that he hoped to use in a book.

When he got to “H,” he stopped at John Holden, who had served on the gunship New York in the Battle of Valcour. A cannon had exploded, Holden wrote, killing a shipmate. His name, confirmed by two other pension records, was Lt. Thomas Rogers. Holden broke the sad news of Rogers’ death to his widow, Molly, who was six months pregnant.

After reading a story about the discovery of an exploded cannon, Quintal called the maritime museum with what he’d found. That call provided the key: The broken cannon that Scollon had discovered was from the New York.

The cannon from the *New York*, showing a missing piece Credit: Jim Carrier

Back at the lake, Scollon and Cohn formed the Valcour Bay Research Project. Proper permits in hand, they enlisted a team of divers and created a six-acre grid of 50-foot squares. Employing magnetometers and GPS, the researchers meticulously noted the locations of artifacts the divers found. The archaeological survey took six years. In 2001 they raised the barrel and two other pieces of the cannon found 60 feet away. In 2006 the team found and raised three more pieces that were 180 feet away.

By that point, Quintal had learned that Rogers was from Westford, Mass. He drove there to learn more. “I walked through the entire cemetery,” Quintal told Seven Days, “and lo and behold,” there stood a tall, gray, lichen-specked stone carved with these words:

This Monoment is Erected
to the memory of Lieut Thomas
Rogers by Mrs Molly his
Sorowfull widow. He was
killed by the splitting of
a Cannon on the Lake
Champlain on the 11th day of
Octr 1776 in the Continental
Army in the serves of his
Country and in the
caus of Liberty
Aged 26 years and
9 months.

Together aboard a boat in Valcour Bay on July 20 this year, Scollon, Quintal and Cohn witnessed the raising of a ragged chunk of iron. It was the last piece of the cannon that killed Rogers.

The physical cannon and Quintal’s research, serendipitously brought together, became the centerpiece of the maritime museum’s exhibit, “Fragments.”

“I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and nothing that I have studied has been more powerful than the story of Thomas Rogers and the memorial put up by his wife, Molly,” Cohn said.

“She used the magic word,” he continued, that explains “why the study of the Revolution is so important to us today and in the future.”

The word: liberty. ➆

“Fragments: Voices of the American Revolution on Lake Champlain” is on view through October 18 at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes.

The original print version of this article was headlined “Fragments of History | An exhibit at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum sheds new light on heroism and humanity at the Battle of Valcour Island”