I visited the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in late September 2023 and filmed this exhibit. The day was hot and humid. Mosquitoes were snacking on my blood all day. That blood must be tasty! Thus, the huffing and puffing you may hear is due to the humidity.
Please check out the photos, stories and additional information on the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum’s website. The link is below. If the link takes you nowhere, type into your browser: “Lake Champlain Maritime Museum Prohibition in the Champlain Valley, a Noble Failure”. That’s how I found it. I think what I found is cached.
From the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum:
“The nationwide ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol known as Prohibition extended from 1919-1933. But residents of the Champlain Valley have been negotiating the relationships between what we drink, who can drink it, and who regulates it since the early 1800s.
In fact, Vermont holds the record for the longest continuous statewide prohibitory law, which was in effect from 1853-1903. Echoes of the debate between government regulations and personal choices that started with the temperance movement continue to play out in society today.
Raise a glass to our complex history as we explore prohibition in the Champlain Valley.
A New Nation of Drinkers
At the founding of the United States, Americans were consuming alcohol at a scale almost unimaginable to us today. American alcohol consumption peaked in 1830, when each person consumed, on average, 5 gallons of distilled liquor each year. Assuming that men were doing about two-thirds of the drinking, that works out to each man drinking 4 to 5 shots per day, every day of the year. In addition, per capita consumption of hard cider was estimated to be at 15 or more gallons per year.
In the early 1800s, hard cider and whiskey were the mainstay of American drinking. Apples trees were everywhere, and hard cider basically makes itself in the Champlain Valley. For rural farmers, distilling corn or grain allowed them to extend the shelf-life of their agricultural products. Alcoholic beverages were often cheaper than coffee and tea, and in an era before pasteurization, safer to drink than water or milk…
19th Century Temperance:
Overconsumption of alcohol in the early 1800s brought real, negative health and societal issues, many of which gave rise to temperance sentiments by the mid-19th century in Vermont and New York’s rural Adirondacks region. Temperance activists were inspired by Maine’s passage of a prohibition law in 1851, the first statewide law to prohibit the manufacture and sale of liquor in the country. In 1853, Vermont became the second state to enact a statewide prohibition law…
New Americans, New Drinking Cultures:
As immigrants moved to the Champlain Valley in the mid-to-late 19th century, they brought their own cultural customs around alcohol. Immigrants came for social and economic reasons, primarily from Scotland, Ireland, and Italy, while others crossed the Canadian border and moved south from Quebec.
Scottish and Irish immigrants moved to the Champlain Valley first to build the canal system in the mid-19th century. In 1834, an upstate New York reverend wrote of Irish immigrants in the Champlain Valley that, “They will soon have five to one against us, — Scotch and Englishmen… They are very noisy people when they drink … there is no stability in their loyalty to our government.” This coded, or not-so-coded, language belied the anti-immigrant sentiment that was rife in the Champlain Valley. In the end, prohibition laws, particularly in Vermont, unevenly targeted immigrant groups…
Women’s Suffrage: A Temperate Movement:
By 1832, around 200 Temperance society clubs had been founded in Vermont alone. Temperance societies became a new social arena in which women could flex their political influence. The temperance movement was often a women-led movement; freedom from alcohol and abusive or neglectful men were major themes. The evolution toward Federal Prohibition is a facet of suffrage and the wider women’s movement in the 20th century. Even the ratification of the 19th Amendment in Vermont, granting women the right to vote, was tied to fears about Prohibition…
Smuggling and the Canal System:
After the opening of the Champlain Canal (1823), Erie Canal (1825), and Chambly Canal (1843), Lake Champlain became a major thoroughfare of commerce, shipping, and transportation. A unique style of boat developed on Lake Champlain called the sailing canal boat. This hybrid cargo vessel…could operate under sail on the open waters of lake and rivers and could be towed in the restricted spaces of the canals. By the mid-19th century, these sailing canal boats carried tons of goods and freight from the Champlain Valley to and from other regions of the country each year…
Federal Prohibition: 1919-1933:
After almost a century of debates about the role of liquor in American society, the United States adopted the 18th Amendment in 1919, prohibiting the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors.” For an area like the Champlain Valley where prohibition and temperance had been debated and legislated since the 1850s, the most important aspect of Federal Prohibition was that it removed all local control from the towns, counties, and states.
The region became known for cross-border and cross-lake smuggling of alcohol from Canada into the United States. Out-of-state crime networks trafficked alcohol, often with the help of local residents, to cities in New York and Massachusetts. Increases in crime and a rift between federal and local law enforcement followed, and by the end of the 1920s, public opinion in the region was very much against Prohibition. Merrit Carpenter, a Vermonter who worked for Lake Champlain Transportation Company during Prohibition, said it best, “Everybody knew who was doing it, but they never got caught. It was because the fellow who was the sheriff there knew he had to put up a show of looking for these guys, but he still had to live there.”
President Herbert Hoover called Prohibition the “noble experiment,” but history has demonstrated it to be more of a noble failure. With the adoption of the 21st Amendment in 1933, the era of Federal Prohibition officially ended and control over liquor regulation was returned to the states.”-https://www.lcmm.org/prohibition/