History
The lake was named for the French explorer Samuel de Champlain, who encountered it in 1609. While the ports of Burlington, Vermont; Port Henry, New York; and Plattsburgh, New York are little used nowadays except by small craft, ferries and lake cruise ships, they had substantial commercial and military importance in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There is conflicting information on Native American names for the lake. Many historical works give Caniaderi Guarunte as the Iroquois name for the lake (meaning: mouth or door of the country), because the waterway was an important northern gateway to their lands. A number of other sources give Petonbowk (meaning the lake in between) as the Algonquian Abenaki name for the lake. The St. Francis/Sokoki Abenaki Band, who make their home along the Masipskiwibi (Missisquoi, "Crooked River") River in northwestern Vermont call the lake Bitawbagok, the same meaning as Petonbowk. Some recent articles appeared during the Champlain Quadricentennial (2009) claiming Ondakina as the “local” native name for the lake, but none cites a verifiable source.
Read more about this topic: Lake Champlain
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
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—William James (1842–1910)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)