Today in 1998, a single and little-noticed line in a funding bill for the National Sea Grant Program led the United States to declare that there were not five but six Great Lakes.
The bill that then-President Bill Clinton signed put $290 million toward research projects along the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as well as the Great Lakes.
But as lawmakers put the funding bill together, in stepped US Senator Patrick Leahy.
He represented the state of Vermont, which does not neighbor any of the five Great Lakes but does border Lake Champlain.
Leahy thought his state’s lake should qualify for some of that federal funding, so he successfully pushed for language in the bill that, for the purposes of the Sea Grant Program money, designated Champlain as a Great Lake.
The largely technical change didn’t get a lot of attention until it became law.
After that, there were all kinds of critics pointing out that no matter what US law might say, geographically and hydrologically, there were five Great Lakes.
Champlain may have had connections to the St. Lawrence River, just as the Great Lakes do, but it wasn’t part of the same basin.
And it simply wasn’t as big enough to be called great: Lake Ontario, the smallest of the Great Lakes, could hold 17 Lake Champlains.
One editorial cartoon suggested that calling Champlain the sixth Great Lake would be like calling Senator Leahy the fourth Stooge (!)
Leahy tried to explain that this was really just a technical change for funding purposes, and that nobody needed to change their atlases.
Eventually he and Congress made a technical change to their technical change.
They removed Champlain’s Great-ness (or at least did away with its Great Lake designation) while still allowing the lake to qualify for the federal research funding.
And for everyone involved, that change seems to have worked out pretty great.
Starting tomorrow in south Georgia, it’s the Valdosta-Lowndes Azalea Festival.
The flowers are only the start of what’s happening at the festival: there’s also a classic car show, a 5K race, live music, dance teams, a lumberjack show and falconry demonstrations.
When Lake Champlain Became A Great Lake… For 18 Days (All That’s Interesting)
Valdosta-Lowndes Azalea Festival
Our Patreon backers make this show great, support our show today!