Lake Champlain Maritime Museum

One of the first new projects the Lintilhac Foundation invested in after Phil and Crea assumed the reins was the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum. Bob Beach, Jr. of Basin Harbor Club and Art Cohn, a diver, archaeologist, and fiery advocate for the history of Lake Champlain founded the Museum in 1986. It combines a strong commitment to fieldwork and research in nautical archaeology with robust exhibitions at Ferrisburgh and Burlington waterfront sites that bring the lake’s rich history, particularly its military history, to life for some 50,000 visitors a year. A major motivation for Cohn in starting the museum was to safeguard the dozens of shipwrecks, many dating to the Colonial era, Revolutionary War, and the War of 1812, estimated to be in the lake and at risk of being looted.

“Lake Champlain has what we think is the best preserved collection of wooden ships in North America,” says Cohn. “At the time that we were discovering that, most shipwrecks were being dealt with as articles of trade and commodities to be ripped out of the bottom of the world’s waters and sold at auction. We said, ‘These are not to be returned to the stream of commerce, these are archaeological sites of great public value’.”

The Lintilhac Foundation got involved early, in 1989 providing support for a full-scale replica of the Philadelphia, one of Benedict Arnold’s gunboats that sank during the Revolutionary War in the Battle of Valcour Island. Completed in 1991, the Philadelphia II is a centerpiece of the museum’s programming at the Ferrisburgh campus, and of a popular annual reenactment of the battle. The Foundation also supported the construction of the Nautical Archaeology Center, in which visitors observe firsthand the practice of this relatively new field, and a conservation laboratory for the treatment and preservation of artifacts recovered from the lake.

With the discovery of zebra mussels in Lake Champlain in the 1980s, Cohn and the museum began to generate support for a “Whole Lake Survey” — a complete mapping of the lake bottom that would, among other things, inventory all known and undiscovered shipwrecks and thus enable their study before they became encrusted with mussels. The resulting project, funded in part by the Lintilhac Foundation, was a partnership with Middlebury College scientists Tom and Pat Manley that yielded a wealth of valuable information for scientific analysis of the lake. To the museum’s delight, the survey also uncovered 78 new shipwrecks, including the Spitfire, Benedict Arnold’s last unaccounted for gunboat and the most important archaeological find in Lake Champlain to date according to Cohn.

For the Lintilhacs, this kind of collaboration is the best of both worlds. Says Crea, “It was very clear that Art Cohn’s nautical archaeology captivated the public’s imagination, and allowed lake studies people like ourselves to contribute to scientific investigations.”

For the Maritime Museum, it’s the military, cultural, and social history of the lake they seek to bring to life for visitors through their discoveries, research, collections, films, interactive exhibitions, and school programs. “We want to get you to care enough about the lake so that you want to protect it,” says Cohn. “You have to have perspective on the planet, and history and archaeology are two primary tools. In Lake Champlain we have one of the best laboratories in North America to study those subjects.”