After the Champlain Canal was completed in 1823, shipping to the south opened a huge market to the West and brought prosperity to St. Albans merchants. Canal boats sailed south on the lake to Whitehall and then continued through the canal to the Hudson River. For about a decade, merchants from St. Albans Bay and St. Albans Village fought wharf wars by building a succession of docks to dominate the lake trade. The arrival of the Vermont Central Railroad in the mid-1800s ended that struggle. Although the railroad reduced commercial shipping, it encouraged summer vacation travel. Samson's Lake View House opened in 1870 and offered fishing, swimming, boating, and later tennis and a dancing pavilion. In 1897, the Champlain Transportation Company bought the steamboat Maquam to run between Burlington and St. Albans Bay. After Maquam was retired in 1906, excursions continued into the 1920s on other steamboats, and streetcars brought village people to the lakeshore for picnics, regattas, and productions on the floating theater in the bay.