10/17/2026
250 Years ago this month, you could have witnessed this pivotal battle right from our shoreline!
Have you seen the Philadelphia in the Smithsonian? (Share you photos!)
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America's Oldest Warship Sank in Her Only Battle and Came Back 159 Years Later, Meet the gunboat Philadelphia, a wooden vessel about 54 feet long, built in the summer of 1776. She is the oldest surviving American warship, more than two decades older than USS Constitution.
On October 11, 1776, Benedict Arnold positioned his outgunned fleet behind Valcour Island on Lake Champlain and waited for the British. The Americans fought on until dusk. Near the end of the battle, a 24-pound cannonball struck Philadelphia near her bow.
She sank about an hour after the fighting ended. Her surviving crew abandoned ship and transferred to another American galley. Philadelphia settled into roughly 60 feet of cold water. Not everyone made it out alive. Human remains were later found in the wreck.
She remained underwater for 159 years. In 1935, salvage engineer and World War I veteran Lorenzo Hagglund raised her from the lake. The cold water had preserved the wooden vessel remarkably well, and she was recovered with her guns and more than 700 artifacts.
The remarkable thing is that Philadelphia was part of an American defeat, yet the battle helped change the course of the war. The fighting at Valcour Island delayed the British advance from Canada, giving the Americans valuable time before the victory at Saratoga in 1777.
The gunboat that sank in her only battle became one of the most important surviving pieces of America's Revolutionary War naval history.
Today, Philadelphia is preserved at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. In 2025, divers searching the original wreck site also discovered an unexploded Revolutionary War mortar shell.
Even after 250 years, Lake Champlain still has stories to tell.
