Colonel Baldwin recorded the start of construction in his journal on this day in 1777. Baldwin had engineered a floating bridge that would stretch from Vermont’s Mount Independence in Orwell to Fort Ticonderoga, the British encampment in New York.

Men worked on frozen Lake Champlain, making huge rock anchors and then lowering them to the bottom of the lake. These were attached to log rafts, creating the strategically located, anchored, floating bridge. The men worked quickly to beat the spring thaw.

Within a year, a winter storm destroyed the bridge, but the underwater anchors are still visible.

Image courtesy the Mount Indepence Historic Site.