Did You Know? - Ticonderoga Part 3: Favorite Stories
The VT Folklife Archive is full of amazing first-person accounts of everyday life in Vermont and New England–past and present. In this feature, we share these stories with you.
This month, we continue with the third article in our four-part series on the steamboat Ticonderoga, currently in retirement at the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT, where it portrays life onboard in 1923—a century ago. In the 1990s, Vermont Folklife partnered with the Museum to produce a multi-part audio documentary, Memories of the Ticonderoga, that focused on the experiences of people who lived and worked on the Ticonderoga during its 47-year life on the lake between 1906 and 1953. These interviews reside in the Vermont Folklife Archive.
For this installment, Associate Archivist Susan Creighton has collected some of her favorite stories told by the crew about adventures aboard the Ti. We'll hear these stories as told by Dick Derry, Jerry Aske, Dick Adams and Captain Marty Fisher, recorded in interviews with Vermont Folklife founder Jane Beck in the late 1990's.
Story #1: Ballasting the Boat
Dick Derry talks here with Jane Beck about the way they had to deal with eager passengers running from one side of the boat to the other:
Dick Derry: Across the gangway from the main engine room was—what we called the engine room, it's really where the chief engineer stayed while the boat was under way—and in that room, there was a small steam engine called a donkey engine. Its function was to ballast the boat. In other words, there were two big water tanks on the boat, one on each side, and you pumped water from one to the other to keep the boat trimmed, or level.
The other time that I can remember that ballasting became a frightful event, was we had a large crowd on board on a Sunday afternoon—`cause the boat would hold 1200 people—and it wasn't uncommon on an excursion to have the boat filled. There was a speed boat that started to circle the Ticonderoga and of course, in those days, a boat on the lake was an odd thing. In fact, all the boats, all the private boats on the lake were kept in a little shed at Shelburne Harbor. So, here was some person going around and around the Ticonderoga in their runabout, probably waving. And the people were, of course, would run from side to side. So, you take 1200 people running to this side of the boat, you got to pump water to beat heck to the other side to keep it level. And I can recall some bad words that my uncle said during this process. [laughs] Here they go to the other side, and turn all the valves and keep the boat trimmed. That was an exciting thought.
Story #2: The Big Race with the Air Force
Jerry Aske talks here with Jane Beck about an impromptu race that took place between the Ti and an Air Force rescue boat:
Jerry: It was another celebration, and again, I don't know maybe it was the same Fourth of July. No, it couldn't have been but it was some function going on up at Plattsburgh. And we left Burlington about the same time as the Air Force—there was an Air Force base here at the Burlington Airport and Fort Ethan Allen, at that time. And they had a rescue boat and it was a wooden boat, probably, I don't know, forty feet long or something like that and fairly fast. And the crew was a motley crew. They spent as much time as they could out on the lake, just running around and drinking and having a great old time. And that day, they decided that they were going to challenge us and get to Plattsburgh before we did. And so Marty said, "Turn on the blowers," to Stanley. The blower being a big blower just down next to the engine room, which force-feeds air to the fireboxes. So, you get plenty of steam; you also make plenty of sparks and smoke, and wear out the firemen pretty fast. But anyway, he wanted top speed. And we got top speed, and we beat the Air Force characters to the Plattsburgh dock. But I think we only did it one other time with the blower when I was on board that summer. But then you always had a big clean up job afterwards because the deck was just covered with ash and sparks and it wasn't very economical, you burned up a lot of coal. We actually went down to the boiler room to help the firemen, Dick being one of them, to help them shovel because there was no way they could keep up themselves. But that boat could move. When you consider how big it is, that old engine but it—I don't know, I've heard that it could do twenty-four miles an hour. I don't think knots, miles, I think. Something in that category. And I have no doubt that that's how fast we were going.
Jane: It must have been pretty good fun though?
Jerry: It was, oh yeah. And of course, cheering all the way, or jeering at them. Yeah.
Story #3: Consequences for the Roughnecks
Jerry Aske tells Jane about an instance where Captain Marty Fisher took it upon himself to deal with some rude behavior on shore.
Jerry Aske: I can remember taking the French language school from Middlebury College out once that summer. And—oh yeah, it was kind of funny because, as you know, they're not allowed to speak English or any other language. They're immersed in French. And so, we deckhands decided that we'd see what we could do to get them to break their code of silence or whatever, especially with the girls, you know. Never did though, never got one of them to crack, they just kept talking to us in French. But when we came back to the dock, some rough necks from town and, I don't know, from Vergennes I guess probably or I don't know what they were up to. But they were on the dock, and they were shouting kind of obscene things and in general, just being pretty rowdy. And Cap Fisher came up to me and he says, "Tell the boys to get ready." He said, "I"m gonna turn on the steam pumps." Now when we used to wash the boat down, we generally just had the low pressure. So, what we did is I spread the word among the crew. And we, with the steam pump, we had really high pressure. I wish we could’ve used it always to wash the boat down but anyway, he turned on the steam pumps—Stanley Value was the engineer and he knew what was up—so he turned on the pump. We got down behind the bulwarks with the hoses, and then when we were ready, we stood up. I don't know how many nozzles we had going, and we just mowed those guys right off the dock, rolled them right up the lawn. And they didn't give us any more trouble. It was kind of fun.
Story #4: The Infamous Bridge Collision Story
This story came up in numerous interviews, with different people providing different perspectives on just what happened. Here, we've put together excerpts from the narratives of deckhand Jerry Aske, fireman Dick Adams and captain, Marty Fisher:
(Jerry): Yes, we left here with just a few people aboard from Burlington, and we went up to St. Albans for a big celebration and I think it was Fourth of July, they had, took a band on board. And, oh we were loaded with people from St. Albans, because none of the boats had been up there since I guess before the War, World War II. And it was kind of uneventful going up, except I did mention one thing, that Horace Corbin came out to wave to us because he lives, he lived in South Hero, we went past his place. Marty always blew the whistle when we went by. And we went through the two bridges; from the main lake, you go through a turn bridge, which is a railroad bridge. And then there's a bay in between that and the automobile bridge called the “gut.” And we went through the swing bridge at the gut, no problem.
(Dick): But going through the draw bridge both the car and railroad, there's only like a four-foot clearance, on each side. And like I mentioned before, the pilot can't see the sides of the ship because of his position in the pilot house up there, you can only see straight ahead and he aims the boat and hopefully it goes where he puts it. [Chuckles] And going through on the way into St. Albans for the first time, everybody is curious, you know, how close are we gonna come, and we got through with no mishap at all.
(Jerry): And got to the dock in St. Albans, took out this big excursion, and lots of festivities, and the band playing and everything. And after, late in the day, we started back. Well, we got through the automobile bridge without any problem, but as we were coming down, heading towards the railroad bridge, there were all these fishermen out there in little rowboats, and they wouldn't get out of the way.
(Dick): And as we were approaching the railroad bridge, I heard the whistles start blowing, over and over, you know. I said, "I wonder what's wrong." So, we had a little ladder against the bulkhead there where you could climb up the ladder just two or three steps and look out the porthole. I climbed up and I stuck my head out the porthole and all I could see was rocks coming.
(Marty): So, I kept blowing her whistle for them to move, they didn't. I had the inspector right in the pilot house with me, so he seen it all. And I couldn't stop her, because I'd have been aground so I made a swing, thinking they would move last minute. And I couldn't…to get around one of the boats, I had to stay too close, and she was filling in and if I let her go sideways, she'd hit her paddlewheels and that've put her out of business for good. So, I turned her over and caught her nose so that she glanced aways, and I knocked a couple of those twenty-ton stones off. We didn't stop, we went right on, so it didn't hurt anybody. But went right on to Plattsburgh and let the people off for there and then on to Burlington, but it took a big section out of her hull.
(Jerry): And Marty knew that ultimately, they probably would move but it would be too late because those paddle wheels suck, you know, create quite a wash. And he kept blowing the whistle, but they wouldn't, they wouldn't move, and I suppose they thought well, we'll get out of the way at the last minute. Well, rather than risk anybody's life, Marty decided to hit the center stone support of the bridge rather than kill somebody.
He decided that he was going to hit the bridge, because he knew that the swing of the boat, he'd started it too late. And those boats aren't like a twin-screw power boat where you can operate one propellor independently of the other. Both paddle wheels are on the same shaft, so the only steering is basically the rudder. So, he had to start swinging just at the right moment to go through that narrow passage. Because of the fishermen, he wasn't able to, and he started his swing—I call it a swing—a little bit late, so he knew at that point that he was gonna hit the bridge. But he consciously decided that he would take it on the forward quarter rather than further aft where it would've smashed the paddle wheels and so forth. And I happened to be standing on the forward promenade deck, right above where we hit. And it's kind of interesting to look down and see that we were gonna hit. And we did, there was no feeling of a jolt or anything. The boat is so heavy that it just dragged big boulders out of this foundation, which incidentally fell very close to some of these fishing boats that at the last minute had pulled around behind the pier and actually swamped a couple of them.
(Dick): I could feel the ship slide out and then it kind of slid back off and all kinds of crunching and grinding, and wood splitting and water flying through the porthole. And I fell on my back. I jumped up and grabbed the ladder and got it down and ran up on deck and everybody was running around like a Chinese fire drill, you know. Come to find out the, there was a boat with fishermen in it—I think it was a man, his wife and some children, I'm not sure. But they were in the channel and wouldn't get out of the way. And you have to maintain a certain speed in order to have control of the boat. So, we were going as slow as we could but at a speed we couldn't go any slower at. And the pilot Marty Fisher decided I'm not gonna hit the people, I'm gonna have to, you know, put the boat on the rocks, which he did. And fortunately, he got around the people and missed the paddle wheel, cause if the paddle wheels had ever got involved in this accident we'd have really had to, you know, a bad time.
(Jerry): My cousin was with me. He worked on the boat that summer, and he and I ran all the way to the stern and pulled the life preserver slats off of the overhead, dropped some of these cork life preservers and threw them overboard to these guys who now were in the water and [we] didn't know if they could swim or not. But we kept on going; the boat as I mentioned didn't even, it didn't even lurch. It just kept right on going, there was a noise but there was no feeling of a jolt or anything like that. And we were still operational, it kept on going and then just as a little aside, as we went—it was almost dark when we went by Horace Corbin's place, on the way back, blew the whistle. There was no action whatsoever at the place. The house was dark, nobody came out. And we found out when we got back to Burlington that he had died of a heart attack between the time we went up and the time we came back. Eventful day!
(Dick) So that night, the boat's tied up in Burlington with all this damage and we're sitting there on the dock, talking about what's gonna happen next, if we're gonna run the rest of the summer or not and we're looking at that big hole in the bar. [Laughs] And we said, "Well maybe, maybe we could get a cold beer or something out of there." So, two of us decided to go in and get the beer, and we crawled in, we're crawling back out through the hole, and who's standing on the dock, but Marty Fisher with his hands on his hips watching us. He said, "You know," he says, "I bet your dads would like to know what's going on here tonight." He said, "Maybe you ought to put that stuff back." So, we turned right around and put the beer back where we got it and that's the last we ever heard of it, fortunately. Cause my father would've killed me, I'm sure. [Laughs] But we did things like that even though we weren't supposed to. Not very often, but once in a while.
There's nothing quite like hearing these stories first-hand from those who were there, telling them in their own words as they remembered events; it's one of the joys of working with our archives. Next month, in our final installment of stories from the Ticonderoga, we'll hear from the man who was put in charge of the restoration of the Ti when it found its new home at the Shelburne Museum.