Tug Annex

The famed and diminutive steam tug Annex was the first tugboat owned by Louis Vandervoort, patriarch of Waterford’s best-known family of canallers. The Annex was also the first steam tug that ever towed on the old Champlain Canal, which (like other canals of its time) was a mule-drawn waterway. Built in 1881 in Kingston on Rondout Creek, the Annex got her start as a “bumboat” on the Hudson River, bringing groceries and other assorted items to vessels and tows going up and down the Hudson River. After being acquired by the Vandervoorts, the Annex made her inaugural trip on the canal in 1903, working for the Ticonderoga Pulp and Paper Company, ushering in a new age of steam-power on New York’s canals. The Annex was the first tugboat to be stationed in Waterford and, to the extent Waterford is today considered a “tugboat town”, the Annex marks the birth of that legacy.

Over the next two decades, the Annex would bring boats up the Champlain and return at the end of the season with “three or four boats.” In 1906, the Vandervoorts towed ice on Lake Champlain with the Annex.

The Annex, with an overall length variously listed at 36’ and 44’, was reported sunk at Champlain Lock 2 due to a collision with another vessel. At the time, the Vandervoorts had the contract to assist tows getting in and out of the lock. The company responsible for the collision paid for a replacement boat, the Comstock, and the Vandervoorts continued with this contract.

It is fitting that the year this wonderful tug met her fate was the year another generation of canal vessels called “barge canal motorships” came onto the scene. That year the ILI 101 was launched in Duluth, MN. Today she is called the Day Peckinpaugh and, as the last of her kind, she is under restoration near Waterford by the New York State Museum.

The Annex is a significant part of Waterford’s maritime history, and wonderfully representative of the transition from mules to tugboats on New York’s canals. The Waterford Maritime Historical Society hopes to construct a working replica of the Annex in the coming years.