Syracuse Herald
August 11, 1929
Boat Bones Line Beneath River Water
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Graveyard for Lake Craft
is Discovered Near Chaumont Bridge
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Hulls Yield Live Wood
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Old and Useless Hulks
Gradually Sink to
Muddy Bottom
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Syracusans on the way to Cape Vincent, St. Lawrence river port famous as a fishing ground for generations, where Harold McGrath, Syracuse fiction writer, annual take a big catch from the blue St. Lawrence, pass over a long bridge at Chaumont, 14 miles from Watertown and 11 miles from CapeVincent.
But few of them know that, between this bridge and the railroad bridge paralleling it 75 rods away is a graveyard for schooners and steam mergers that once sailed from one end of the Great Lakes to the other.
Here, under the smooth surface of the water, kept calm even during high winds by the breakwater afforded by the long vehicular bridge, lie skeletons of the lake craft once known wherever inland sea sailors congregate.
Here, where the Chaumont River makes a junction with Chaumont Bay, an arm of Lake Ontario, decrepit old sailing vessels and lame old steamers after long years of service, have been rowed and anchored. Each passing year in this cemetery for boats has taken toll from the rotted hulks. Vandals on the look-out fir firewood have hastened the destruction.
Slowly but steadily the parts of the boats above of the boats above the water have become smaller. During the last 25 years freight boats on the eastern end of Lake Ontario have grown fewer and fewer, with a corresponding decrease in the number of hulls towed to the last resting place between the two Chaumont bridges. Today only a few timbers protrude above the water where once a dozen craft, some of them still carrying rigging, lay.
Few bridges of the type that at Chaumont still exist. Chaumont River is about one-quarter mile wide at this point. A few years after Leray de Chaumont settled on the banks of the bay which bears his names company was formed to build a bridge across the waterway. A stone causeway was built across the louth of the river, broken by four gaps to allow the tidewater to ebb and flow, for Lake Ontario tides operate all the way up to Depauville, six miles from Chaumont.
The stone causeway still carries the road, which is now a modern concrete highway. .The old wooden railing low enough to serve as a seat for spooning lovers, has been replaced by an iron fence. Wooden bridges across the tide-water runways have given way to to steel and concrete except over the largest gap, where a swing bridge allows passage of boats.
In the early days of Chaumont tolls were collected of all who passed over the bridge. Stephen Horton, whose grandson, William Horton, still ives in Chaumont, was tollgate keeper for many years. The little old cottage in which Mr. Horton collected tolls and made barrels in his basement shop, still stands at the eastern end of the bridge. It is owned by Charles Congdon, Watertown newspapers publisher, who lives in the house built by Leray de Chaumont at the opening of the 19th century.
One of the best known boats whose keel and ribs lie in the mud between the Chaumont bridges was the Emma, a three-masted schooner. The Emma was built and owned by the late Frank Phelps, one of an army of lakes sailors who went out from Chaumont, Three Mile Bay, Sackets Harbor or Henderson annually to sail before the mast on the upper lakes. After a number of years on the upper lakes, Frank Phelps, who has worked his way from a place before the mast to a captaincy of a big schooner, built the Emma, an 80-foot schooner, during the winter of 1880-1881.
This schooner, while dwarfed in size by the Andrew J. Dewey, the Mary Copley and other boats built in Chaumont during the peak of its boatbuilding days, was one of the staunchest craft that ever road out a storm. For more than 30 years this ship, under command of Capt. Frank Phelps or Capt. Pearl Phelps, his younger brother, still an active sailor, plied up and down the lakes - carrying cut stone from the Chaumont quarries to upper lake ports; laden with coal for elevators at Oswego or Ogdensburg; delivering grain or lumber or shingles or any other cargo which it might obtain the job of carrying.
Few waterways are more dangerous than the eastern end of Lake Ontario during a storm, and the old Emma rode out more than one gale while seeking harborage in Chaumont Bay that would have shaken the of less hardy sailors than the Phelps and their crew.
Few Emma sailors are still living. Frank Phelps, after a long career, died about eight years ago. Charles Lowe, cook on this vessel for years, has been dead for five years. Jesse Dunham, Charle Bucknam, and Burt Bovee, all have passed on.
About 18 years ago, after a long and useful career, the Emma was towed to the graveyard, where she joined a fleet of stone barges, the L. B. Stone, the Pinafore and Northern Lights and many other boats which once were familiar sights on the Lakes. The Jessie Bain, one of the most famous of early St. Lawrence River passenger boats, fell to pieces on Sawmill Point, in upper Chaumont Bay, where it was drawn out of the water 35 years ago.
Schooner with tall masts is the Emma. Steam tug is Mignon.
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