A century ago on the day when the shock of the San Francisco earthquake reverberated around the world, a new sidewheel walking-beam steamer made waves of her own. Three thousand miles to the east at 3:08 in the afternoon of April 18, 1906, the blocks were removed and the Ticonderoga slid down the ways of the Shelburne Shipyard into the waters of Vermont's Lake Champlain. When in 1906 the Delaware and Hudson Railroad—through its subsidiary, the Champlain Transportation Company—built the 220-foot Ticonderoga, it expected, as with many of its earlier sidewheelers, that this gleaming new boat would last perhaps 25 to 35 years before replacement. Little did it realize it was entering the twilight of commercial steamboating and that this new vessel would be the last in a long line of 29 steamers built for Lake Champlain. Remarkably, the Ticonderoga bucked the trend and necessity to keep up with technological advancement and steamed her way through nearly five decades of active use, intact and unaltered. Since her last season under steam in 1953 and the subsequent monumental two-mile overland journey to the Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vemont, the Ticonderoga has been a centerpiece of Lake Champlain history and is one of the most extraordinary accomplishments of maritime preservation.
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