The Samuel De Champlain History Center and a Journey into the Past

The Town of Champlain is rich in history. Its first visitors, the French, arrived from Canada in 1609. Although the Town of Plattsburgh was the first in the county to become a township in 1785, Champlain was the second, in 1788. Clinton County defined its borders that same year, and was the first county to be created in northern New York, according to the Clinton County Historical Association.

Historians depict Samuel de Champlain as a French navigator who had set out to establish a trading post on the St. Lawrence River in 1608 when he “discovered” Lake Champlain the following year and named it after himself. Celine Racine Paquette always had a penchant for books and local history, and when the right opportunity presented itself, she decided it was time to open a history center dedicated to Samuel de Champlain and the history of the town.

“There was no place locally in the town or village to store old pictures, maps and books about this area, from this area and about the people from this area,” Paquette said. “I’ve always admired this building, and there was nothing happening with it. It used to be a bank, but there had been a lot of vandalism here. The fellow who owned it was from Canada, and he wasn’t interested in it. He called me up one day and asked if I wanted to buy it.” In 2002, she did.

When Paquette purchased the building, there was no heat and several windows had been broken. The walls, lighting fixtures, heating, air conditioning, sheetrock and woodwork all had to be replaced or reinvented, and a security system to keep vandals at bay needed to be installed. “There isn’t one thing that’s original here, except the building itself,” Paquette laughed. “The first job was to clean it out. I had two dumpsters full of broken windows.”

The next step was to hire contractors. Paquette brought in the Trahan brothers, who worked on the building between other jobs for several years. She also hired architect John McKenna to draw up new floor plans to guide the restoration.

As a French speaking child growing up on a dairy farm in Champlain, Paquette first stumbled across a library at age five and fell in love with books. Ironically, the library she found was located in a small room upstairs in the building now known as the Samuel de Champlain History Center. A number of years later, as a high school graduate, Paquette worked the summer before leaving for college as a bank teller in the same building.

Her love for school continued into her college years. Paquette graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in school nurse teaching, and spent 24 years in the East Greenbush school district. After obtaining her master’s and doctoral degrees (both from SUNY Albany), she spent three years as a middle school principal in Ticonderoga.

She returned to Champlain and married Larry Paquette in 1987, running Paquette’s Insurance Agency with him until his untimely death five years later. Their enthusiasm for local history ran deep, and the couple amassed a large collection of historic books, pictures, maps and collectibles, which have become part of the historical center.

The second floor of the building houses old books, maps, postcards and pictures. It was completed at the beginning of 2008, shortly after Paquette sold the insurance agency and gave up her seat on the County Legislature, a post she held for 12 years. Most of the items in the center came from the Paquettes’ personal collections, but some were purchased at The Pipe and Book Bookstore in Lake Placid and on E-Bay. A small percentage of items were donated, and a few are on loan, according to Paquette. In the room Paquette calls her “Champlain Room”, she displays shelves of books in both English and French on Samuel de Champlain, along with “the largest collection of Franco-American books in New York State”—books about people of French descent who emigrated to the U.S.

The first floor is currently being painted, and still needs to be carpeted. Paquette estimates completion of the project by late spring of this year. It will mostly be used to showcase exhibits. Paquette held an exhibition on Champlain’s Community Day at the museum last summer during the quadricentennial celebration, which featured a display of locally crafted wooden skis, chairs and hockey sticks from Bredenburg Ski Factory, items from local hotels which are no longer in existence, an old film projector more than 100 years old from the Lyceum movie theater, and a model canal boat display fashioned after the ones built when Champlain’s canal boat building industry thrived. The boats used to haul goods from Quebec to New York City.

“People were fascinated with the building, because many remembered it as the old bank from when they were kids,” Paquette said. Built in 1880, the second story wasn’t added until 1905. She has a framed picture of the progression of the building as the structure changed throughout the years.

Just up the hill outside the history center is the home of Pliny Moore, one of the first settlers in Champlain, and the man Paquette said was most responsible for developing Champlain in the late 1700s. According to Paquette, Moore was a very prominent man, who held several titles in the town and county, including judge, merchant, customs inspector and postmaster. He took in wounded soldiers during the Battle of Plattsburgh in 1814, and also spearheaded negotiations between the British and the American military.

Sawmills were an important part of Champlain history because the Great Chazy River provided hydropower to transport timber. There was a thriving boatyard at the foot of River Street. Sheridan Iron Works employed generations of men who made the machinery for book binding, until it closed its doors in 1985. Nearby, the Lyceum showed movies allowing residents to escape for a few hours of entertainment. Point Au Fer, a military post in the Town of Champlain, was the site of army rendezvous and captured prisoners during the Revolutionary War.

“Point Au Fer was a busy place and an important part of military history, because of its strategic location on Lake Champlain,” Paquette added.

Dewey’s Tavern was another historic spot in Champlain. It was where the troops quartered during the war, as well as the site of many important war conferences. It later became the last stop on the Underground Railroad, harboring fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. These pieces of history are preserved in the books and pictures housed within the center.

As founder of the Samuel de Champlain History Center, located at 202 Elm Street in Champlain, Paquette plans to hold a community history day to dedicate the building. She would also like to dedicate Pliny Moore’s gazebo, which has been restored and moved to Glenwood Cemetery on Oak Street. Historic plaques will be relocated and rededicated at Paquette Park this year, and 2010 marks the 150 year celebration of Saint Mary’s Church.

Paquette still needs to catalogue some research materials, but when work on the center is completed, she plans to run some programs of historical interest at the museum for adults and school-age children to promote the history of the area. She would like to have speakers do presentations on canal boat building, Dewey’s Tavern, Samuel de Champlain and other historical topics.

Finding time to get the center up and running has been Paquette’s greatest challenge. She has served as vice chair for the NYS Commission on the Hudson/Fulton/Champlain Quadricentennial since 2002. Paquette currently is a board member of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, the accrediting body for colleges and universities; a trustee of Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, VT; chairman of the board of Saint Anne’s Shrine in Isle La Motte, VT; a board member of Emergency Services in Champlain and a volunteer for the SUNY Strategic Planning Initiative.

Structurally, the building has proved to be a challenge to restore, since there are no square corners—the building follows the contours of the river, which has made installation of the heating system a creative undertaking.

But the history center is a legacy she will pass on to the community. Although the building itself is rife with history, the contents of the center tell their own story of the richness of Champlain’s legendary heroes and edifices.