Lakeside Lore

By Eleanor Durr

In the late nineteenth century, Lakeside, Ohio, was founded as a Methodist camp meeting ground, where the faithful could study and find inspiration in a setting of scenic beauty. Today, the community continues to serve its original purpose, as well as being a popular resort on Lake Erie.

 

The author's long association with Lakeside has provided her with a wealth of memories, some of which she shares in this book. Miss Durr scans many aspects of Lakeside; its scenic glory, the inspirational and entertaining programs that have been given there through the years, and, especially, the people.

 

It is the personal sketches, including many about still-active members of the community, that help the reader understand why Lakeside has endured with such vitality. A place is its people, and the people of Lakeside were their town's builders. They have maintained Lakeside with dedication to their purpose and with pride in their community. This pride has resulted in the restoration of old homes, and in a feeling for the history of the village as expressed in the founding of its museum, Heritage Hall.

 

The summer programs sponsored by the Lakeside Association are the heart of its mission. They combine inspirational talks by well-known ministers and foreign missionaries with education by such guest speakers as Lowell Thomas and Branch Rickey and entertainment by such artists as Eileen Farrell and Mimi Benzell.

 

Miss Durr's lively sketches of both local residents and famous visitors are a valuable source of local history. They give the reader a feeling for the warmth and vitality of this inspirational community.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lakeside Heritage Society
• Release date: Aug 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781956250008

Book preview

Preface

Lakeside, Ohio, was founded on the rocky south shore of Lake Erie as a Methodist camp meeting ground on the Marblehead Peninsula. The original purpose was to provide a place for moral and religious fervor in an area surrounded by vineyards, where there was much wine drinking and rowdyism among pleasure-loving people. A dock was built in 1872 because transportation was chiefly by water, and the first camp meeting was held in 1873.

Known as The Chautauqua of the Great Lakes and A Place with a Purpose, Lakeside soon branched out from its original intent to extend its season by adding a Chautauqua program. Thus it has attracted many notable speakers, singers, entertainers, and religious leaders. Chaplains speak daily, and there are Sunday services. The evening auditorium programs are of great variety. This book includes sketches of some of the men and women who have contributed to its prominence.

Lakeside has mostly remained a place apart; it is strongly fenced and can be entered during July and August only through two gates, where fees must be paid or tickets checked. Once one is inside, one may take advantage of recreational facilities, parking, and the auditorium programs. Most find it a place to renew the spirit, while quieting the mind.

If one stays the year round, it is like living in two places. The summer guests are one group and the permanent residents quite another. Many beautiful people make up Lakeside and, since people make places, you will meet these few and observe how many diverse types have greatly enriched this community.

Part I

Lake Erie

1

Lake Erie is Alive

Few states are so blessed as Ohio with natural resources. Lake Erie borders on two-thirds of the north shore and the Ohio River the south. These waterways have favored Ohio for settlements and vacationers.

Ohio’s vacation wonderland lines the shores of Lake Erie; all types of cabin cruisers, yachts, freighters, and boats skim its waters. The opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway brought oceangoing commerce with great ships plying this water route from the Atlantic.

When the early settlers came, they cleared the land of virgin forests, squandered the timber, drained the swampland, and wasted the soil’s riches. The Great Black Swamp, at the southwest corner of the Lake, was a wet forest that supported aquatic vegetation. When the swamp was drained, the spawning and nursery areas of such fish as the walleyes, sturgeon, and others were destroyed. In the years of settlement, there were larger preferred food and game fish—even trout. In early times, hooks were used for fishing, then seines, traps, and nets. Intensive fishing with the use of nylon nets has depleted many stocks of fish because many immature fish were caught and destroyed. Heavy nets were used for the large sturgeon, which were valuable smoked, for oil, caviar from eggs, and isinglass from the air bladder. Refrigeration reduced the need for salting and smoking. The sea lamprey invaded Lake Erie in the 1920s, but has not become a serious problem.

Civilization has adversely affected Lake Erie. The western end of the Lake, with its islands, shoals, and rocky reefs, is often swept clean by northeastern storms; its deeper areas fill with sediment. Proximity to Detroit and Toledo’s population and industrial centers has caused a large inflow of domestic and industrial waste that deposits sediments in the low parts of the Lake. This metropolitan waste releases toxic materials, producing algae and poisons from dead organic matter. The oxygen deficit restricts the spawning, nesting, and feeding habitats of preferred fish. Conservation is moving to correct the errors of the past, and, fortunately, Lake Erie has shown much improvement in the last few years. Rehabilitation efforts include sewage treatment plants, banning of DDT and contaminations of mercury and chlorides, fish management and regulations.

Fish hatcheries have had to replace natural spawning grounds, and it is in such nurseries that various species can be introduced. Research and surveys need to be made and fish reintroduced into the Lake as it becomes purified.

Fish, like humans, respond to their environment by demanding oxygen and pure water. When large edible fish can live and mature in Lake Erie, we, too, can become more healthy. The quality of water, like the quality of mercy, need not be strained.

2

Lake Erie

Lake Erie is the twelfth largest lake in the world. It is 241 miles long and 57 miles wide. It is next to the smallest of the Great Lakes with an area of ten thousand square miles, evenly divided between the United States and Canada. The greatest depth of Lake Erie is over two hundred feet; Lake Superior is six times and Lake Michigan four times that deep. Lack of depth accounts for the quick changes—the sudden storms and high waves. It is the most southerly of the Great Lakes so that westerly winds blow across it with moderating effect. Stretching across two-thirds of Ohio, it is the oldest, meanest, and busiest of the Great Lakes. More ships, of all sizes, kinds, and descriptions, rest on the bottom of Lake Erie than any other body of water in the Western Hemisphere.

After the great glacier leveled hills and the ice sheet melted, Lake Erie was much larger than it is now. Reminders of the glacier are the glacial grooves at Kelleys Island and on shoreline rocks. Lake Erie was the last of the Great Lakes to be discovered by white explorers because of the fierce Iroquois Indians. Louis Joliet saw it and Robert de La Salle sailed the first vessel, the Griffon, on it in 1679.

French adventurers, traders, and missionaries followed. The breakdown of British power began after Perry’s victory in 1813. Perry’s monument on Put-in-Bay, a 352-foot shaft, was dedicated one hundred years after this victory. The St. Lawrence Seaway opened Lake Erie to oceangoing commerce. The 225 miles of shoreline is mostly gently sloping beaches, making this an ideal center for vacation seekers, with both sandy beaches and rocky shores.

Lake Erie has eighteen islands, and all are at the west end of the Lake. These were the favorite hunting grounds of the Indians. The Wyandot was the most numerous tribe. The Erie Indians were a small but cruel tribe. They were called the cats. The Iroquois outnumbered them ten to one and liquidated their leaders. The Five Nations formed the fierce Iroquois tribe, which vanquished the Eries. The mound builders preceded the Indians. These mounds with some implements are found on the islands, but their history is fragmentary. The island stamping grounds could be as ancient as Egypt. By 1805, the Indians relinquished all claims to the Lake Erie islands and lands.

The greatest inland waterway in the world is the St. Lawrence Seaway. It is twenty-three hundred miles long from the St. Lawrence River through the Great Lakes to the furthest point of Lake Superior. An international boundary line divides Lake Erie between the United States and Canada.

The line divides a trio of Sister Islands; East and Middle Sister are in Canadian waters, West Sister is in U.S. waters. These are the lonely islands, separated from the archipelago. They are like solitary blotches where Robinson Crusoe might have found refuge. West Sister Island is twelve miles northeast of Toledo and eighteen miles west of North Bass Island. This silent, rocky isle is as Oliver H. Perry saw it in 1813. It is uninhabited and government-owned, serving as a wildlife preserve. Thousands of black-crowned night heron, big white, and blue heron find this an ideal sanctuary for nesting. As many as six nests are often found in one hackberry tree. The rocky shoreline has a seventy-foot bluff at the north with a flashing light. Special permission must be had to visit this eighty-six-acre isle. The Toledo naturalists have done so, but Leona Mowry tells me it posed quite a problem with the nesting herons. It was also found that some sly person had planted a crop of marijuana on the island, which was destroyed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife personnel before it could be harvested.

The Canadian islands consist of Pelee, which is the largest in Lake Erie, containing thirteen thousand acres. It is ten miles long and four miles wide. The marshland was pumped dry for farming. There are tourist attractions and a trading post. Hen Island broods over her big and little chicks and is four miles west of Pelee. Middle Island is south of Pelee. Its solitary occupants are lighthouse keepers and government employees.

The Marblehead Peninsula is in the Lake Plains area with the Lake giving as much as twenty days’ longer growing period. The peninsula is part of the old Lake bed.

An easy way to remember the names of the Great Lakes is that they spell HOMES.

3

Lake Erie’s Archipelago

When one-thousand-foot-high glaciers scooped out the bed of Lake Erie, the ice smoothed the rocks to a fine polish, while the granite boulders scratched grooves from northeast to southwest. An archipelago of islands and reefs with dangerous shoals are the remains of a limestone bridge that once cut Lake Erie in two parts. Often called The Wine Archipelago, these islands have supported vineyards since 1840. With three weeks’ longer growing season than on the mainland, grapes and wineries flourished. The islands are reached daily by the shortest airline in the world and by ferries from Port Clinton and Catawba Island.

Catawba Island was once an island, but when the Portage River changed its course, it became a peninsula. It is known for its cliffs, beach house, golf course, yacht harbors, fruit farms, fine homes, and trailer courts.

Mouse Island is a little gem of seven acres—and only a stone’s throw from Catawba. It was bought by Rutherford B. Hayes, when he was governor, for his daughter and four sons and was in that family till recently.

Starve Island is an acre of rocks with a few trees where gulls nest.

North Bass Island is the most northerly and contains 706 acres. This is known as the Isle of St. George. There is a post office and a one-room school, but no stores. The Meier vineyards are here.

South Bass Island has fifteen hundred acres, with Put-in-Bay as a year-round resort and the International Peace Monument commemorating Perry’s victory. The famous Victory Hotel burned here in 1919. There are a yachting regatta, tours, state park, caves, grape harvest, and all manner of sports to enjoy here.

Gibraltar Island is at the entrance of Put-in-Bay harbor and contains six acres. It was once owned by Jay Cooke, the Civil War financier, who entertained lavishly at his castle. The fish hatchery and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory are here.

Ballast Island is a tiny summer haven of fifteen acres. Before the Battle of Lake Erie, the Perry squadron provided the ships with a ballast of stone. A large log house built over 110 years ago is still in use.

Middle Bass Island of 750 acres is three miles from Put-in-Bay and is known for the Lonz Winery. The brick and stone facade of this building appears as a castle as one approaches it. A small one-room school is still in use on the island and was taught by Louise Brown (Mrs. George) of Lakeside a few years ago.

Rattlesnake Island has sixty acres and is shaped somewhat like a snake with rattles, but there are no snakes now. It is famed for a special stamp, in demand by collectors, but good only to be sent to Port Clinton.

Sugar Island has twenty acres and is privately owned.

Green Island has twenty acres. It is owned by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and is undeveloped.

4

Kelleys Island

Kelleys Island is the largest American island in Lake Erie. It contains 2,890 acres, or four square miles. As a part of Erie County it is twelve miles north of the city of Sandusky, but only four miles from Marblehead in Ottawa County. Prior to 1800, it was known as Cunningham’s Island, this Indian trader being the first one known to have lived there.

The thick red cedars were first cut to clear the land, and many of these were used to fuel the first lake steamer, Walk-in-the-Water, built in 1818 and sunk two years later. In 1833, Charles Olmstead of Connecticut, who was studying the glacial grooves, discovered Inscription Rock on the south shore. This smooth surface is thirty-two feet long by twenty-one feet wide and eleven feet above lake level. It has 122 pictograph carvings by the Erie Indians, who were massacred by the fierce Iroquois about 1655. Many Indian relics have been found here—tomahawks, hatchets, clubs, pestles, needles, pipes, fishhooks, arrowheads, and stone articles, fashioned by a vanished civilization.

Two brothers, Datus and Irad Kelley, inspected this island in 1833 and purchased most of it by 1836. They built docks, shipped red cedar and limestone, divided and sold lots, and, in 1840, changed the name to Kelleys, when sixty-eight persons were living there. The quarries on the island are forty feet deep. This limestone built the Cleveland and Cedar Point breakwalls, the Cleveland high-level bridge, and the first lock at Sault St. Marie. Flux stone for blast furnaces was shipped to Pittsburgh. At their peak, fourteen hundred men operated the sixteen limekilns.

Many foreign workers were brought in for the Kelley and Marblehead quarries in 1891, when the Kelley Island Lime and Transport Company bought up these quarries. In 1930 the island quarries were closed.

Datus Kelley introduced the first grapes to the island in 1842, and the first wine was made in 1851. Many Germans migrated to Kelleys to engage in grape culture. The Kelleys Island Wine Company cellar had a capacity of half a million gallons. It burned in 1933. As late as 1967, one hundred tons of grapes were exported for grape juice.

Tourists have been the biggest business on Kelleys since 1946, when the steamer Islander began making trips. The four hundred feet of glacial grooves, fifteen feet deep, are the finest in the world. The Addison Kelley mansion (built 1861-65) is the most imposing building on the island. It is of native stone and has a unique central stairway that is unsupported. Addison was the son of Datus, and his five children were born here. The house of William Kelley (grandson of Datus) has elaborate scrollwork and Gothic windows. The Himmelein House (1849) is a massive three-story hotel that once catered to theatrical road companies, but is used only by the family now. Captain Frank Hamilton’s home (1865) was built by his grandmother. He was a historian of the Great Lakes; his collection was purchased by and is displayed in the Hayes Museum in Fremont. Hamilton died in 1972. Another distinctive home is that of George Huntington, whose son E. K. developed the Bay Point resort on the peninsula.

The state of Ohio owns 650 acres on Kelleys Island with only eight developed for a campground. For several seasons I attended the Erie County women’s camp there. Food and all materials must be transported to the island, making building costs at least 30 percent more than on the mainland. The cost of maintaining the school is also the highest in the state. Inscription Rock, the glacial grooves, five homes, and the village hall are on the National Register of Historic Places.

5

Indian Tribes

The isles of Erie and the peninsula were the favorite hunting and fishing grounds of many Indian tribes. From the time of the mound builders to the later tribes, there were thousands of moons of Indian supremacy. These nature people found the waters lush with turtles, frogs, and fish; the deep wilderness furnished them with a surplus of wild game. Being adept in the use of poisoned arrows, stone axes, and stone mortar and pestles for the grinding of grain, the Stone Age Indians left numerous of these artifacts, which are still being found. They were imaginative, superstitious, and fond of adventure and conquests.

The Erie Indians were savages who killed, plundered, and burned, but they left the finest record of any of these tribes. The Erie (wildcat) Nation, in an effort to preserve their Nation, made a picture record of their trials on a large, flat rock, known as Inscription Rock, on Kelleys Island. This is the best preserved rock in America of an antiquarian period. Although many of the pictures have been obliterated by weather, the inscriptions were deeply cut on the polished surface of the limestone. These show the occupations of the Eries, the coming of the Wyandots, and the final massacre of their three thousand people by the fierce and powerful Iroquois, who carried off the few remaining Eries as slaves. The drama of their lives ended in the disastrous scenes of fierce wars. The Erie Nation was totally extinguished in about 1625.

Indians were nomads, rather than permanent dwellers, and moved about as wandering tribes, quite similar to our summer visitors. The names of these tribes are familiar in our many Ohio towns and county names. There were the Senecas, Miamis, Ottawas, Shawnees, and Wyandots—the last being the most powerful and numerous. The Mohawks also visited these shores, and the Catawbas were on the island named for them.

The Wyandot tribe named Sandusky, as they referred to it, as the site along the Bay San-Dus-Tee, or at the cold water.

The last member of the Ottawa tribe of Indians in this county was Betsy Mojohn, who died in 1908 at the age of ninety-two. Her log cabin was built in 1853. This has been moved to the property of Mr. and Mrs. Ted Nissen, east of the Mon Ami in Catawba. The Ottawa Historical Society is attempting to restore and preserve it as an historic site.

6

Signature of Time

The name Havighurst was not new to Lakeside because Mrs. C. R. Havighurst came here for many summers and was especially prominent during the Women’s Foreign Missionary Society week. She was branch secretary of children’s work, general secretary, and finally, national secretary of junior work. In this last office she had charge of the juniors at Bradley Temple (1931) when Mrs. C. C. Peale (Norman Vincent Peale’s mother) was dean of the school.

After Walter Havighurst graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, he became professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His books have all concerned this area, including The Quiet Shore, The Long Ships Passing, and Land