Life on a Canal Boat: The Journals of Theodore D. Bartley 1861-1889

The journals of Captain Theodore Bartley provide an intimate portrait of the life of a canal boat family crisscrossing America during a period of extraordinary change.

Captain Bartley, owner of three Lake Champlain canal boats, kept a fascinating day-to-day journal of his life from 1861 to 1889 on the canals and waterways of the Northeast.  His travels included voyages north to Ottawa, west to Buffalo, and south to Philadelphia.  His journal entries range from dramatic tales of near sinkings during gales on Lake Champlain to descriptions of the lives of ordinary people during the late nineteenth century.  Bartley witnessed history in the making: the Civil War, ironclads, famous sailing ships in New York harbor, Central Park, the theaters of New York City, the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, the first electric lights and telephones, the Statue of Liberty, the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, the Blizzard of ’88, and the grand Centennial Celebration of Washington’s Inauguration in New York City in 1889.

“. . . we are all indebted to Captain Theodore Bartley for his three decades of patient and insightful daily chronicling of his career aboard a wooden canal boat on the Northern Waterway.  His record provides us today with an insight into the 19th century world of canal boats that has no equal.” — Arthur B. Cohn, Founding Executive Director of the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum