This story by Briana Brady was first published in the Shelburne News on Sept. 11, 2025.
It was a novel thing in 1955 to move a steamboat across the land. It’s still inexplicable: deciding to sink an 892-ton boat down onto railroad freight cars in the dead of winter, hauling custom-built tracks from behind the boat up to the front as it inched across the landscape, all to make it part of a museum.
Electra Havermeyer Webb, the founder of Shelburne Museum, was big on novel ideas. Before the Ticonderoga, she already had at least eight structures moved onto the museum grounds, including a 19th century lighthouse from Colchester and a historic jail from across the state in Castleton.
It took a little over two months to move the boat, which had been chugging around Lake Champlain since it was built in 1906 at the Shelburne shipyard. It never moved more than 250 feet in a day.
“I think she instilled a lot of pride in the people that worked around her and in the endeavor of what was going on here, what she was creating. I think most of the workmen around building the museum had a great fondness and respect for her, and it takes a special leader to be able to do that,” Chip Stulen, the museum’s director of preservation, said.
Stulen has been in charge of breathing life into the Ticonderoga for almost half the time that it’s been on land. In 1993 when he was first hired, he said the boat had fallen into disrepair, although maybe not in a way that was always obvious to visitors.
“You could open up a room and you could see moss growing on the carpet, and not only that moss on the carpet, but you had ferns growing out of it,” Stulen said.
When the boat had been on water, he noted, it had an entire crew looking after it. But then, once it was a part of the museum, it had to compete with all the other structures that needed care. The project of making sure a boat, never meant to stand forever in the grass, stayed sea-worthy fell behind.
Some of the work that had been done previously had even caused further issues. Stulen said some of the patch jobs to leaks ended up causing even more condensation — when he started, guides were moving an estimated 30 buckets around the boat to catch the drips.
In the mid-1990s, the museum undertook a massive restoration of the Ticonderoga, with Stulen steering the ship (pun intended).
“We were basically taking the boat apart and then putting it back together again. So, we were opening up areas on the Ti that nobody had seen before, except for the workmen that put it together,” Stulen said.
When Havermeyer Webb had the Ticonderoga moved to the museum, it hadn’t come with a blueprint — no index of materials or list of manufacturers.
According to Stulen, preserving the ship has sometimes meant finding inventive ways to mimic its original design.
For example, a significant portion of the interior flooring of the boat is made of rubber puzzle piece-shaped tiles, their red tabs pressed seamlessly together. In contemporary times, the tiles are not just unique, they’re essentially obsolete.
Stulen had to find a company in California that would make them to order. Luckily, the museum ended up with a surplus. The tiles cover the grand staircase and the landing beneath. However, someday, the surplus will run out again.
Preservation is a continual process.
As Stulen sat on the deck of the Ti last week in one of the caned chairs lined up for visitors, a worker nearby braided in a new piece of the diamond-patterned roping that acts as a deck fence and, at one point, carried away one of the many wooden pillars holding up the ceiling for repair.
Even parts of the pillars have needed to be replaced. Stulen has worked to find similar wood, sometimes needing to repair the repairs.
“I’m continually amazed by the old growth material that was on the Ti where the grain is so tight that it has longevity to it,” Stulen said. “And even five years later, we were coming back, having to repair that.”
In its life at Shelburne Museum, the Ticonderoga will be repaired and replaced in parts. It will be preserved in spirit even as many of the original materials waste away. Preservation is about staying as close as possible to the original, but in preserving shape and material and style, Stulen is also preserving stories.
Stories of passengers crisscrossing the lake, of the advent of motor vehicles climbing ramps to board and at least one story of a very cramped elephant seeking passage.
“It’s under my skin,” Stulen said. “I remember early on, I’d stand up on the upper deck by the walking beam, and because you could see the lake at that time from there, you just sort of stood there and kind of imagined the boat moving a little bit.”
The Shelburne Museum will be holding events September 11-14 to celebrate 70 years of the Ticonderoga.
