For more than 100 years, the riverbank at Champlain was a bustling industrial place tied to Lake Champlain's role as an important water highway before railroads and highways, when thousands of vessels moved people and cargo daily. The Great Chazy River served both transportation and boat building, and in the early 1800s the Nye family built and operated the schooners Champlain and General Scott out of Champlain. The invention of the steamboat, the opening of the Champlain Canal in 1823 connecting Lake Champlain with the Hudson River, and the Chambly Canal in 1843 bypassing rapids on the Richelieu River made commercial sailing vessels obsolete on Lake Champlain. Sloops and schooners gave way to canal boats, some with sails but most towed by steamboats to the canals and then by mules. In Champlain, Pliny Moore Jr., Royal Moore, and Timothy Hoyle built and owned some of the region's first canal boats, and by the mid-1800s Champlain had become the second largest shipbuilding center on Lake Champlain. For almost a century, the canal boat industry strongly shaped the growth of the village and town of Champlain, employing carpenters, dock hands, and ship captains, while the timber, paper, iron, and farming industries used schooners and canal boats to ship products to Montreal, ports along the Hudson, and as far as New York City and Buffalo. Canal boat activity peaked in the early 1900s, but more efficient railroads quickly replaced it, and canal boat construction on the Great Chazy River had ceased by 1919.