Another of our 2026 winter projects here at the Hancock House is working with the collections. We are currently working on the two sections of the archives that house ledgers, journals and other paper records. We have removed these books from the stacks and laid them out in our Meeting Room.
Here they are reviewed for condition, checked for accession numbers, and related information (sources, authors, descriptions) is updated in our database (PastPerfect). The archive shelves will be cleaned and the documents re-shelved. For public view we’ve selected two items as representative of two of the collections’ themes: local school records and Lake Champlain steamboat logs.
The first public school here in Ticonderoga was established in 1792. School District #6, established in 1813, was one of the earlier districts and included parts of what we now know as South Ticonderoga and parts of the Town of Hague. Shown in the photos is one of the first journal books from that district. It’s first page records setting an annual school tax of $75 per household and appointing a tax collector and two trustees charged with using the tax for school repairs and fuel.
The second item is one of several Steamboat Logs in our collection – the 1832 freight book of the Lake Champlain steamboat, Phoenix, Gideon Lathrop Master.
The two pages below cover the steamboat’s travel back and forth between Whitehall, New York, and St. John, Quebec (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, on the Richelieu) in late April and early May of 1932. The Phoenix carried a wide variety of cargo, including 3 boxes leather, 3 boxed candles, 5 sacks of feathers, two lots of furniture and machinery and a shipment containing a bellows, an anvil and a vice. According to the log, the trip one way took about a day and made stops in Burlington, Barber’s Point and Plattsburg.
