Dedicated Crew Makes 1906 Steamboat Ship-Shape

In the winter of 1955, Electra Havemeyer Webb had the last Lake Champlain steamboat towed to the site of her new museum. Even

for a sugar heiress who was fast becoming known as a maverick collector, this was an unusual undertaking: The Shelburne Museum is two miles from the lake, and the steamboat — the 1906 side-wheeler Ticonderoga — is 220 feet long and weighs 896 tons.

On the water, the Ti had been a lithe and graceful speedster. With twin coal-fired boilers, a classic walking-beam engine, and 25-foot paddle wheels on either side of a sleek hull, she cruised at 17 miles an hour and was good for 23 in a race, flags and pennants snapping in the wind. But winching the ship up Chittenden County’s icy hills was another matter altogether. The move took 65 days.

It left the Ti permanently berthed in a shallow bowl of grass near an 1871 lighthouse that Electra Webb had collected off the lake’s Colchester Reef. In July 1956, both opened to the museum’s visitors, who could also stroll through a two-lane covered bridge, a barn with a handsome collection of Webb family coaches and sleighs, a jail built entirely of Vermont slate, and a picture-postcard schoolhouse, along with other structures that Mrs. Webb had gathered from across Vermont and filled with art and antiques. The Ti quickly became the museum’s biggest draw, attracting those who remembered boarding her for trips up and down the lake as well as countless visitors who would otherwise never lay eyes on a steamboat.

This year the Shelburne Museum has spent the summer celebrating the 100th anniversary of the side-wheeler’s launch. Thanks to a meticulous restoration that began in the early 1990s and continues today, the Ticonderoga is in better shape now than at any time since it left Lake Champlain.

Virtually the entire vessel is open to the public, from the pilothouse down to the engine room, from the cramped crew quarters underneath the forward freight deck to the elegant dining room over the fantail. The wooden decks echo with the sounds of running kids, and museum volunteers happily open the hidden doors from the freight deck into the paddle boxes. Employees demonstrate the bells — a gong and a “jingler” — with which the pilot asked the engineer to go half ahead, full ahead, stop the engine, or go astern.

At the same time, the Ti is about as rare an artifact as any museum could have. Gutenberg bibles and even lunar samples are commonplace compared with American side-wheel steamboats. Only one other American vessel with a walking-beam engine escaped the scrappers — the ferry Eureka, in San Francisco, which was extensively rebuilt at least once. The Ti, on the other hand, was altered only slightly during its working life, and is as invaluable to historians as it is popular with visitors. “It’s an amazing thing that we have it,” says Chip Stulen, the ship’s curator.

It’s also amazing that the ship is in such good condition now, because as recently as 15 years ago its survival was in doubt. On the lake, the Ti’s crew had stayed on top of routine maintenance between runs, and Shelburne shipyard employees had handled bigger jobs. But on land, the ship languished. Visitors and weather took their toll. The museum’s painters and carpenters did the best they could, but they had many other responsibilities and knew little about how a vessel like the Ti was put together. They repaired decks with standard roofing materials, put brown paint on varnished woodwork, and sealed weepholes meant to prevent moisture from building up inside walls. By the early 1990s, “she was a real mess,” says Mr. Stulen. “A lot of areas you couldn’t go into.” The upper deck was closed and leaking.

A longtime trustee of the museum — J. Warren McClure, a marketing guru who was known to everyone as Mac and who was a former owner of The Burlington Free Press — began urging the board to do something about the side-wheeler, even though the museum was facing a variety of financial difficulties. Mr. McClure, who died in 2004, thought at first that it would be easy to find someone to underwrite a repair project, says his wife, Lois J. McClure, who grew up taking grade-school trips on the Ti. Eventually, she recalls, “He came in one night and said, ‘We’ll have to do it ourselves.’”

What the couple thought would be $300,000 worth of work, she says, ended up lasting five and a half years and costing them about $1-million. Even so, Mrs. McClure says, “We never had a moment when we said we were sorry.” She and her husband were veterans of what she calls “a lot of interesting philanthropic adventures” — they gave mostly to Vermont organizations and to colleges — and had learned to make sure their money went where it would do the most good, so they also gave $750,000 to establish a restricted endowment to maintain the Ti in the future.

The side-wheeler is “the thing that’s kept the Shelburne Museum alive,” she says, adding that it draws many visitors who wouldn’t come just to see Mrs. Webb’s collections of weather vanes, jugs, and vernacular buildings. The 1996 sale of five pieces from Electra Webb’s collection of Impressionist art improved the museum’s overall financial picture, although it angered some Vermonters.

The Ti was built by the Champlain Transportation Company to carry both passengers and freight. Its steel hull was fabricated in Newburgh, N.Y., and sent in pieces to the Shelburne Harbor shipyard, while its engine came by canal boat from Hoboken, N.J. Extraordinary in its own right, the engine consists of a single vertical steam cylinder, nine feet long and 53 inches in diameter, that pushed a rod connected to the front of the big black walking beam, which is mounted on a hinge high up behind the stack. A rod running down from the other end of the beam connects to the cranks that drove the paddle wheels, each of which is nine feet wide. When the ship was under way, the walking beam moved like a seesaw. The elegant wooden superstructure was constructed last.

In August 1906 the Ti began making scheduled runs serving St. Albans and Burlington, Vt., and Essex, Plattsburgh, and Port Henry, N.Y. It was also available for excursions and other special trips, including a 1909 visit to New York’s Fort Ticonderoga by President William Howard Taft. The federal Steamboat Inspection Service certified it for 1,041 passengers, and the Ti often ran full. While the forward part of the main deck was reserved for freight and vehicles, passengers could enjoy the main deck’s aft dining room, climb a cherrywood staircase to a long, elegant salon, or continue up to the open hurricane deck. Although the Ti was not built for overnight trips, it had five staterooms to accommodate travelers who arrived on late trains and wanted to sleep aboard before morning runs over the lake. In the fall, it operated until the lake iced over, then laid up at Shelburne Harbor until spring.

The ship remained in scheduled service through 1932, when the Depression cut deeply into what traffic had not already been stolen away by cars. Beginning in 1937, a new owner operated the Ti as a showboat and excursion boat, using the dining room for dancing. By 1948, though, business had dropped off again. The ship was sold to the son of one of its former captains, but he was unable to make money with it. A 1950 campaign by the local Junior Chamber of Commerce raised enough money to pay off the boat’s debts and keep it running, but it wasn’t long before one of its fans went to Electra Webb and asked for help.

Mrs. Webb, daughter of the founder of the American Sugar Refining Company and wife of a Vanderbilt heir, had been collecting Americana for decades, but it was a 28-carriage collection from the estate of her father-in-law that prompted her to establish the museum, in 1947. Four years later she made was her biggest purchase yet, spending $20,000 on the Ti (“I think a lot of other stuff you bought is much worse,” said her husband, James, when she told him about the purchase). For two seasons the museum operated the side-wheeler on the lake, but running it was costly and finding engineers who knew how to operate a walking-beam engine was increasingly difficult. Shortly after the museum staff recommended retiring the Ti, Electra Webb decided to move it off the lake and up the hill.

The trip could only be made while the ground was frozen. The ship was first floated onto a cradle supported by eight sets of railroad-car wheels. Two short, parallel tracks were laid down, the Ti was winched forward, and then the tracks behind it were taken up and relaid in front of it. A March thaw nearly brought the whole undertaking to a halt, but in early April 1955 the ship slid into its permanent location.

Museum officials say some 150,000 people visit the Ti every year (the museum is open from May through October). But more than visitors, it’s the weather that causes wear, says Mr. Stulen, who was hired as the ship’s curator after the McClures made their gift. Rain, snow, and sunlight are the enemies of painted wood. When the renovation began, he says, the five-person team found rot everywhere.

“You don’t really know what’s there till you start tearing it apart,” Mr. Stulen says, adding: “We realized right from the beginning that it was always going to be worse than it looked like.” A big movable tent and portable heaters made it possible to work year round, but as much of the ship as possible was kept open for visitors during the summer months. Where possible, the original fabric of the ship was preserved and restored. Where old pieces of wood could not be reused, carpenters used them as models for cutting their replacements.

The Ti has been more or less returned to its 1923 appearance, because that was a good year for the ship, and because a lot of archival information for the early 1920s is available. Several staterooms are not only open but also outfitted with period luggage and other artifacts. “We wanted to bring the boat to life, as though the passengers had just stepped off,” Mr. Stulen says. The tables are set in the dining room, a turkey is just out of the oven in the galley, and pillows wait on crew members’ bunks. The freight deck holds a horse-drawn wagon and several early automobiles, including a 1925 Durant touring car that belonged to Mr. McClure.

These days Mr. Stulen is busy with routine maintenance and smaller restoration projects, like building a new ship’s boat — a small rowboat that crew members used for chores — to replace the lost original. Mr. Stulen’s chief painter, Brian Pornelos, keeps busy too: “I just paint to one end and then turn around and start all over,” he says. Volunteers have been a big help, including Mr. McClure, who continued to enjoy working on the ship even as Alzheimer’s disease made it more and more difficult for him to recognize Mr. Stulen and Mr. Pornelos. One of Mr. McClure’s last tasks, in fact, was helping Mr. Pornelos paint the new ship’s boat.

Mr. Stulen has a list of projects he would like to get to, like rebuilding a set of missing crew stairs and recreating bench seating around the perimeter of the hurricane deck. And he worries that the museum board may need to revisit the question of paying for the ship’s upkeep, because he doubts that the money the McClures set aside for the Ti will suffice to keep it in the shape it’s in now.

“To plan for long-term needs, the endowment needs to be considerably larger,” he says, noting that maintaining a 100-year-old side-wheeler is always going to be expensive. “What’s available to spend, we spend it.”