Lake Champlain

Lake Champlain forms a long water corridor between the St Lawrence country and the valleys leading toward the Hudson. Indigenous peoples used its shores and routes for fishing, hunting, travel, and diplomacy long before Europeans named it. Canoes and portages linked the lake with neighboring waterways, making it part of a broader network rather than an isolated body of water. The surrounding forests and cultivable ground supplied resources to communities whose relationships crossed the region.

Samuel de Champlain reached the lake in 1609 amid French alliances and conflict with the Haudenosaunee. In 1755 French forces began Fort Carillon near its southern end to defend the corridor; British troops took it in 1759 and renamed it Ticonderoga. American forces captured the fort in 1775 during the Revolutionary War. These successive struggles made use of a water route that Indigenous communities had long known and traveled.