Discover Whitehall: Canal, Nature, and History

Whitehall lies at the southern tip of Lake Champlain. When planning your trip, it helps to distinguish the area’s different highlights: waterways and activities along the Champlain Canal, nature exploration, and architectural and military history. This lets you tailor your stay to whether you want to spend most of your time outdoors, explore historical topics, or combine both.

Canal, Trail, and Nature

The Champlain Canalway Trail runs along the Champlain Canal from Waterford north to Whitehall; the full route is 63.4 miles long, and Whitehall is its northern terminus. The trail is open to cycling, walking, jogging, and other seasonal activities. For trip planning, this means thinking of Whitehall as the end point of a longer route, rather than treating the 63.4 miles as the distance within the area itself.

Lock C-12 in Whitehall marks the northern end of the Champlain Canal. Skenesborough Park provides physical and visual access to today’s canal and to Wood Creek. Together with the trail, these offer different ways to experience the water: a recreational route along the canal, the canal’s endpoint, and a park with access to the canal and creek.

Saddles State Forest offers a different focus on nature. It covers 2,471 acres and is located in the Towns of Fort Ann and Whitehall; here, you can explore nature in an area with limited infrastructure. The trail focuses on a route and activities, while the forest is defined by its size, location in two towns, and limited infrastructure. This difference can help you plan a day outdoors around the type of activity you want.

Defense, Transportation, and Architectural History

The Whitehall Heritage Area focuses on defense and transportation. Whitehall’s harbors, parks, Main Street, and Skenesborough Museum illustrate the area’s history as the base of Benedict Arnold’s Lake Champlain fleet during the American Revolution and as a prosperous port on the Champlain Canal. The site of Fort Skenesborough served as a shipyard for General Arnold’s Lake Champlain fleet. The history of the military fleet and the area’s development as a port are two distinct ways to explore its history.

The area’s architectural history also reveals distinct periods. Skene Manor is a Victorian Gothic mansion in Whitehall, built in 1874–1875. The Skenesborough Museum is housed in a reinforced-concrete canal terminal building constructed in 1917. The museum was founded in 1959, during the Town of Whitehall’s bicentennial. The construction date and the museum’s founding should therefore be distinguished: 1917 dates the building, while 1959 dates the institution. This places a 19th-century mansion alongside an early 20th-century canal terminal building that later became a museum.

Discover more destinations: Fort Ann, Fort Edward, Eagle Bridge, Argyle

For the broader travel overview: Washington County.