The completion of the Champlain Canal in 1823 transformed Whitehall from a minor port at the head of Lake Champlain into a bustling transshipment point for goods bound for Troy, Albany, New York City, Buffalo, and the West. Lumberyards, icehouses, and shipyards soon stretched along the waterfront from the lock to “Fiddler’s Elbow,” a tight turn in Wood Creek half a mile from the village. Hotels, taverns, and shops served a steady stream of travelers, while stables and mule barns provided winter quarters for hundreds of animals. Canal families settled in Whitehall, and their boats filled the harbor when ice stopped navigation. Cargo sloops and schooners crowded the wharves to transfer loads of lumber, iron ore, and marble to canal boats small enough to pass through the locks. Shipbuilders soon designed a sailing canal boat that could raise its centerboard, lower its masts, hitch a towline to a mule, and move directly into the canal, saving owners four to five days of waiting at the wharves on each trip. Passengers traveled by packet boat, towed up the lake by steamboats and then pulled by relays of fast horses through the canal, and immigrants heading west could expect to reach Buffalo in seven to nine days.