“It is very common for sleigh, horses, and men to fall through the ice, where the water is some hundred feet deep; and you have no warning of your danger till the horses drop in, pulling the sleigh after them.” — Hugh Gray, writing of Lake Champlain in 1808
Fears crowded into the 19th-century mind. Fear of childhood diseases, which claimed so many offspring that parents worried about getting too attached to their children; fear of the deadly epidemics that claimed young and old alike, and which were so mysterious that they seemed almost biblical; and fear among many that there was little hope of avoiding eternal damnation.
But to this era of fears, we must add another: the fear of going through the ice.
Early histories of Vermont towns are full of stories of drownings. Read some of these histories and you’ll get the sense that these people must have taken little for granted. Death could come so suddenly.
Take the case of Myron Newell of Charlotte. In February 1810, Newell drove a sleigh and team of horse across Lake Champlain to Essex, N.Y., to transact some business. When he failed to return home that night, his family was understandably alarmed. They searched the shoreline and presumably the lake ice, but found nothing.
A month passed with no word of Newell’s fate. Then a young man in town dreamed he knew where to find Newell. He led searchers to a spot on the ice, a short distance from the Vermont shore, and there they found part of the sleigh. Searching further, they made a grisly discovery. On the lake bottom, they found the rest of the sleigh, with the horses still attached, and Newell’s body, still grasping the reins. Friends theorized that he had lost his way and driven the team into an opening in the ice.
During the same period, a young man named William Hickok was skating with a friend on Lake Champlain halfway between Burlington harbor and Shelburne Point. The pair glided into a hole in the ice, and that’s the last anyone saw of them.
Dennison Sargent of Woodstock was working at a mill in Warren. One morning, while he was cutting ice from the waterwheel, someone raised the gate on the dam and Sargent was washed under the waterwheel, down the raceway and under the ice below the mill. Later, when his absence was noticed, Sargent’s body was found under the ice.
In Brookfield in 1810, a man by the name of Belknap drowned because he didn’t listen to friends who said the ice on Colts Pond wasn’t strong enough to hold him. He tried to cross anyway. To his great surprise, but not theirs, he plunged through to his death. The accident reportedly triggered the building of the village’s famed floating bridge.
Such drownings were more common then, though not because people were any less intelligent; we still have plenty of people today who would ignore warnings and do exactly what Belknap did. It’s just that many fewer people could swim then. In those days, being able to swim was an unusual trait, even among sailors.
Rough roads or smooth ice?
Town histories tell of people drowning while doing physically dangerous work, like leading log drives, after tumbling down wells, and, apparently most commonly, while bathing in rivers or streams.
But factors other than the inability to swim probably triggered drownings under the ice. Seemingly solid sheets of ice must have been an enticing shortcut — much quicker than following the crude and often snow-covered roads of the day. Anyone traveling along Lake Champlain, or any of the state’s other large lakes and ponds, must have been tempted to risk it. Indeed, many drowning stories came from the Champlain Islands, where people had no other way to get to the mainland during winter than braving the ice.
The oddest story from the islands of a winter drowning, however, involved a man who had no interest in crossing the ice. The story, which appeared in the Vermont Historical Gazetteer in the 1870s, tells of a man named John Griggs, who nearly a century earlier was involved in a bitter land dispute in Alburgh.
Things got so bad that in 1786 a posse, supposedly sent by local resident Ebenezer Allen (cousin of Ethan and Ira Allen), ambushed Griggs and a friend. The friend was shot in the leg and disabled for life. Griggs escaped uninjured, seemingly because posse members were too drunk to capture him.
The feud flared again in 1799. This time a posse led by a deputy sheriff from St. Albans managed to capture Griggs. Posse members tied him up, placed him in a sleigh, and drove him south over the frozen lake toward St. Albans. But partway across, the sleigh broke through the ice. All the men managed to scramble free — all except Griggs, who drowned, because his hands were bound.
Hanging the horses
Hugh Gray, a visitor from England, rode a sleigh from Canada into Vermont on the lake, and lived to write about it. Gray describes the experience of “traveling over an uniform surface of ice in very cold weather” as a mix of terror and boredom. “Curiosity freezes under such circumstances, and the only prospect which arouses attention is the inn, or village, which is to afford the comforts of food and fire,” he wrote in a book titled “Letters from Canada.”
Despite the tedium, Gray wrote that “(t)raveling on Lake Champlain is, at all times, really dangerous; and I would not advise any one to attempt it, if it can be avoided.”
A sleigh going through the ice was “very common,” he noted. But on the bright side, the area of thin ice is generally not too large. Once you’ve extricated yourself from the sleigh, he explained, “you find the ice generally strong enough to support you.”
Unfortunately, it was generally not strong enough to support the horses. To save them, Gray wrote, you must almost kill them.
“When the horses fall through the ice … the struggles and exertions they make, serve only to injure and sink them; for that they should get out…themselves is, from the nature of the thing, perfectly impossible.”
So before setting out, experienced sleigh drivers tied a sort of noose around the neck of each horse. “The moment the ice breaks, and the horses sink into the water, the driver, and those in the sleigh, get out, and catching hold of the ropes, pull them with all their force, which, in a very few seconds, strangles the horses and no sooner does this happen, than they rise in the water, float on one side, are drawn out on strong ice, the noose is loosened, and respiration recommences.”
Gray claimed that horses that have experienced this sort of resurrection “get so accustomed to being hanged, that they think nothing of it.” But this peculiar technique didn’t always work, he noted: “It sometimes happens that both sleigh and horses go to the bottom; and the men too, if they cannot extricate themselves in time.”
Such a disaster occurred days before Gray’s journey on Lake Champlain. And it nearly happened to him.
While riding south, he saw ahead a 5-foot-wide gap in the ice. With no time to rein in the horses, the driver urged them to run faster. “The horses took the leap,” Gray wrote, “and cleared the opening, carrying the sleigh and its contents with them.”