[1] Along with the Crown Point peninsula across the narrows, the area was the site of conflicts between Great Britain and France as they struggled for control of North America.

[2] Chimney Point is a Vermont State Historic Site, preserving a 1785 tavern and presenting the story of three cultures, Native American, French Colonial, and early-American.

In 1690, the British governor of New York sent Captain Jacobus de Warm from Albany with orders to watch the French and Indians from Canada on Lake Champlain and to “endeavor to despoil, plunder and do them all injury as enemies, according to the usages of war.” De Warm built a small stone defense at Chimney Point that he, 12 soldiers, and 20 Mohawk allies occupied for about a month.

[8] In 1743, Gilles Hocquart, Intendant of New France, was granted a seigneurie of approximately 115,000 acres (47,000 ha) on the east shore of the lake, much of today's Addison County.

The population of settlers at Pointe-à-la-Chevelure peaked at the beginning of the French and Indian War (1754–1763), at approximately 150 with 21 houses on the east side of the lake and 19 on the west.

[10] In the summer of 1759, as British Major General Jeffery Amherst and his army of 12,000 men seized Ticonderoga, the French retreated north to Canada, blowing up Fort St. Frédéric and burning houses on both sides of the lake.

[11] On the west side of the lake, the British built massive Fort Crown Point with forty-foot-high walls and a six-acre parade ground, but it was destroyed by fire in 1773.

[15] Until the defeat of the American fleet at the Battle of Valcour Island, the Crown Point-Chimney Point narrows remained an advanced outpost and naval base.

Settlers on both sides of the lake fled south, leaving, wrote one observer, their houses and all their possessions “to the enemy, or to the flames.”[16][17] The British under Governor General Guy Carleton occupied the area from mid-October to early November 1776.

Lieutenant General John Burgoyne and his army of 8000 men returned to Crown Point briefly in late June 1777 before continuing south to Ticonderoga and Mount Independence.

German troops from the Duchy of Brunswick under command of Major General Friedrich Adolf Riedesel camped at Chimney Point.

With the end of the Revolutionary War in the mid-1780s, Benjamin Paine built a tavern at Chimney Point and began a ferry service across the lake.

[20] For 80 years, the bridge was a crucial link in the life and economy of the Champlain Valley, promoting tourism and tying the two sides of the lake together commercially and socially.

[25] Noted Swedish-Finnish explorer and naturalist Pehr (Peter) Kalm visited the French settlement at Pointe-à-la-Chevelure in July 1749, staying more than two weeks.

In the third volume of his Travels into North America, he included detailed descriptions of the lives of soldiers, the houses at the settlement, Fort St. Frédéric, the wind-mill, and the plants, animals, and minerals of the area.

On the opposite side the country is well inhabited.”[27] A tavern at Chimney Point was featured in the popular 1839 romance, The Green Mountain Boys: A Historical Tale of the Early Settlement of Vermont by Daniel Pierce Thompson.

In the novel, which Thompson claimed was based upon "incidents which actually occurred," Green Mountain Boys leaders Ethan Allen and Charles Warrington (a fictionalized Seth Warner) engage in a drinking contest with British soldiers in order to escape capture.

[28] The original Lake Champlain Bridge, although unidentified, played a prominent part in the 2000 supernatural thriller What Lies Beneath, directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer.