Shipwrights in Vergennes Key to Battle of Lake Champlain in 1814-- Part 1

From the September 12, 2021, Vermont Digger  "Then Again:  Shipwrights in Vergennes were key to critical 1814 battle" by Mark Bushnell.

September 11, 1814, was the day Americans won a critical engagement in the War of 1812 called the Battle of Lake Champlain.  The British lost that battle and the war turned out to be essentially a draw, but it might have been a different conclusion had they won at the fight.

And, this victory was in large part because of the prodigious work  of an accomplished naval shipyard  on the banks of Otter Creek.  This place built the vessels that helped repel the British invasion on Lake Champlain. 

As it had in the American Revolution, Lake Champlain played a vital role in the military strategy of the conflict.  American commanders knew that the British would likely use the lake as an invasion path. 

Twenty-eight-year-old Thomas Macdonough was given a really small fleet of ships to stop the British.  Under his command  were six sloops and two 40-ton row galleys.  This small fleet was further diminished  in July 1813, when two of the sloops ventured too far up the Richelieu River at the north end of the lake and were seized by British forces, who repaired the damage they did to them and began using them against the Americans.

--Brock-Perry