I’d promised to share a few more photographs from our recent visit to the Shelburne Museum. One of the delights of this remarkable gem is the Ticonderoga, a side-paddle-wheel steamship that traversed Lake Champlain from the early to mid-1900s. What a pleasant surprise to see this boat now preserved on land and to read of its amazing history including the chapter of its arrival at the museum.
Strolling around the boat is truly a walk back in time. The rich detail preserved by the Museum provides such a wonderful snapshot of what travel on the Lake must have been like, from the kitchen to the dining room or the engine room to the wheelhouse. There is far more than can be absorbed in a short visit and this one part of the museum alone could lead to hundreds of other journeys into the fascinating history of the region.
A few photographs to entice you to visit or, if, as we had, you’ve been before, to re-visit!
What a surprise to see this huge boat on land!
One can imagine the water lapping at the depth markers.
Details, like the bracket, from a time when ornamentation was simply part of life, not a “luxury!”
The engineer’s station, still gleaming
The rivets on the boiler
The daily tools of keeping the boat running
Easy to imagine the engineer having just stepped out to attend to the boilers.
Simple, small details make such an impression of the whole.
A speaking tube in the pilothouse
And the compass, again easy to imagine it in use on a foggy night
The wheel…
…and the array of lines connecting the brass speaking tubes.
The ticket office seems still ready to function.
More of the kind of gorgeous ornamentation to common to the age of this boat
Dinner is being served!
The light coming through the cut-glass windows was stunning.
And the light made even more magical by a large mirror.
No room for a simple newel post here!
Care to sit a minute and wait?
The steam engine’s walking beam, with a rooster ornament, a symbol of the Shelburne Museum
Even the letter is “unnecessarily” fancy!
A model of the ship.
Still Learning To See 
19th century machines tend to be beautiful in a way missing from most of today’s technology. One reason might be that only the beautiful ones where preserved in museums, but I have the feeling that craftsmen and engineers in those days tended to add some beauty beyond the mere functionality.