Many of the same river uses described in the AASF curriculum for the New England sea coast area also occurred in the Lake Champlain Basin. We have added material crucial to understanding past land uses around Lake Champlain.
Geologic History: Glaciers carved soft sedimentary rock in this area beginning about 1.6 million years ago, and didn't start to melt and recede until about 20,000 years ago. For thousands of years the Lake Champlain basin was flooded with waters backed up against the glaciers to the north, and for about 2,000 years, Lake Champlain was actually the Champlain Sea as ocean water flooded into a basin carved by receding glaciers. But without the weight of a mile-depth of ice, the Champlain Valley began to rebound until the surface of this sea became higher than the level of ocean water. The salty sea water then flowed back into the Atlantic and water from rivers surrounding the basin filled the lake with freshwater.
First Inhabitants & River Uses: People have lived in this region for about 12,000 years. The first people (in what archeologists call the Paleolithic Period) hunted the herds of caribou, moose, elk, musk-ox, and ate salt water animals such as walrus and clams. When the Champlain Sea became filled with freshwater, during the Archaic Period, large animals moved north as forests began to grow and people living in the Champlain Valley began to hunt small animals and made hooks and spears for fishing in the lake and its tributaries. Later, about 1,000 B.C., the Woodland tribes participated in more settled occupations. The Abenaki peoples lived in what is now Vermont, and the Iroquois occupied the New York side of the lake. Rivers were their primary means of transportation and the area around them became hunting territory. Villages became located near river rapids where fish was plentiful, although villagers may have moved nearer to the lakeshore during the summer.
European Settlement: The French were the primary settlers north of Lake Champlain, and the "discovery" of Lake Champlain is attributed to Samuel de Champlain in the early 1600's. French explorers, missionaries and settlers all used the rivers for transportation and food. France was at that time an enemy of England, and the British had claimed much of what is now New England. Both countries knew that control of Lake Champlain would determine who ultimately would "own" the whole region, and both used the rivers and the lake for moving armies and fighting wars.
Ship building, bridges, plank roads, and house construction required huge numbers of logs. Floodplain and lowland forests were cut by settlers who floated logs down rivers to settlements and the lake during spring freshets. Rivers were harnessed by dams for energy to power sawmills, grist mills, carding and fulling mills, and blacksmith shops. Farms took over floodplain areas. Wetlands were drained for farming and improved road systems, and sometimes river channels were straightened for better log transport.
Making potash was the first way a farmer could profit from clearing his land. Hardwood ashes mixed with water and lime, filtered, boiled and cooled became like grey stone. This substance, potash, was used in soap, glass, bleaching and dyeing. Four to five tons of wood made about 40 pound of potash.
Hemlock trees were stripped of their bark for tanneries that turned cowhides into shoe leather. Perhaps as much as a million and a half acres of the Adirondacks were cut over for hemlock used in tanning hides. Large tanneries were usually on the edge of the wilderness and created their own towns. Each year they needed as much as 6,000 cords of bark cut from 1,000 acres.
Even more wood was cut as fuel for producing lime, which was made by baking limestone until it could be crumbled. Lime was used for bleaching, tanning leather, making plaster, cement and potash, as a farm fertilizer, and mixed with iron ore to make iron.
Iron ore in the hillsides and low mountain areas of the Basin was dug and hauled along quickly made roads to forges along the rivers. River water power worked the bellows and created the blast for the fires that melted the iron, and operated the forges and trip hammers. The bloomery forge was a direct ore-reduction process for turning ore into molten metal. A water blast created air pressure to make the charcoal fire burn hotter. The water-powered trip hammer hammered out impurities in the "bloom," the lump of iron produced by the forge.
Many upland hills were clearcut for turning hardwoods into charcoal production to fire the iron forges. t is estimated that on the New York side of the lake, between 200,000 and 250,000 acres of Adirondack-Champlain forest were cleared just for the manufacture of charcoal iron. On the average it took 4 tons of ore and 300 bushels of charcoal to make one ton of iron. Charcoal in the early years was made in sod-covered mounds, and later in brick beehive kilns. In 1864, thirty northcountry New York forges consumed a total of 6,700,000 bushels of charcoal.
More wood was needed to fuel steamboats, locomotives, and to make paper pulp and paper.
Throughout the Basin, heavy cutting of forests led to massive erosion, sediment-clogged streams, and loss of habitat for birds and animals. Heavy logging exposed the soil to sunlight so the soil was dried out and had less ability to hold water. As well as being the "highways" for moving products and goods, rivers also became the receptacles for industrial waste. The rivers carried away chaff from grist mills, sawdust, stone dust, burned charcoal, used tannin, iron slag, dirt from the washing of tons and tons of iron ore, spent pulp fibers, and coal and chemicals from the paper mills.
Although salmon were so plentiful they were loaded from streams by pitchforks into the wagons of the first European settlers, by 1840 salmon were extirpated. Beavers were gone even before that date. Local governments provided bounty money for other species they wanted to wipe out of the area, such as wolves and rattle snakes.
Much has been done in the latter part of the last century to ameliorate the environmental abuses created by earlier industry in the Lake Champlain Basin. But, who knows how long it will take for streams and rivers to recover from past and current land uses?
References: Teachers and students should not miss the opportunity to use This Lake Alive!, An Interdisciplinary Handbook for Teaching and Learning about the Lake Champlain Basin, by Amy B. Demarest, published by Shelburne Farms (VT), 1997, with funding from USEPA.