Blue Hole of Castalia

At a glance

Overview

The Blue Hole is a spring-fed pond about 75 feet across and 43 to 45 feet deep on the northern edge of Castalia, one of several cold, oxygen-free springs where an underground river in the limestone surfaces and feeds Cold Creek on its short run to Sandusky Bay. Major Robert Rogers described the Castalia springs in 1760-61, and the constant flow, which kept Cold Creek from freezing, drew mills to its banks from 1810 and gave the village of Venice its flour trade. The Blue Hole itself is young: geologists writing in 1932 dated its collapse to about 1820, when a mill dam raised the water in the upper pond, with a further cave-in in 1914. Trout clubs leased the creek from 1878 and bought it in the late 1880s; the Castalia Trout Club, owner of the Blue Hole, opened it as a roadside attraction from the 1920s until 1990, drawing as many as 165,000 visitors a year with its vivid color and 'bottomless' reputation. It is now private, and a similar blue spring can be seen at the state fish hatchery nearby.

The name

A 1916 account says the Connecticut proprietor Jessup named both Castalia and Venice. The name Sandusky itself is tied to these springs by Wyandot tradition: aged Wyandots told General Harrison that their ancestors, charmed by the clear cold springs near where Cold Creek enters the bay, named it for 'the cold water,' and Wyandot chief William Walker gave the meaning 'at the cold water' in 1835. (source)

How the land formed

Castalia stands on Middle Devonian Columbus and Delaware limestone over the Silurian Monroe dolomite, at the foot of a limestone promontory that once jutted into glacial Lake Warren, whose beach ridge the Clyde-Castalia road follows. Rainwater charged with carbon dioxide has dissolved channels through these rocks, so the country south toward Bellevue is pocked with sinkholes and has almost no surface drainage; the water travels north underground and wells up at Castalia in four springs and the Blue Hole, supplying about 25,000 to 30,000 gallons a minute. The Blue Hole formed about 1820 when the roof of a cavern collapsed under pressure from a mill pond dammed in the village, and a second cave-in in 1914 gave it its present, roughly circular 75-foot width. Its water lacks free oxygen, holds between 46 and 51 degrees Fahrenheit year round, and carries a high percentage of calcium carbonate, which has built beds of marl and tufa over the prairie north of the village that were later dug for cement. (source)

Native American history

Ver Steeg and Yunck (1932) wrote that the Castalia area was frequently occupied by the Ottawa and Wyandot, the Wyandot having a village on the present site of Castalia, and the 1916 county history says forts and mounds found there were evidence of an Indian village; neither names a date or excavated site. Wyandot tradition recorded in the same history links the name Sandusky, 'at the cold water,' to these springs. In the 1740s a Wyandot band under Orontony lived at the village of Etionnontout near Sandusky Bay before moving to the Ohio valley in 1748; Wikipedia, citing R. Douglas Hurt (1998), places a Wyandot settlement under Orontony at Castalia itself by 1738, while the Dictionary of Canadian Biography says only 'near Sandusky Bay.' The land passed to the United States under the 1805 Treaty of Fort Industry. During the War of 1812, on June 2, 1813, a raiding party landed at Pickerel Creek and attacked the three-house settlement at the head of Cold Creek, killing Mrs. Snow and three small children and carrying the other women and children to Detroit, from which they were returned that fall.

• Wyandot village at Castalia: village, present site of Castalia, not dated in the source
• Forts and mounds reported at Castalia: earthwork, Castalia; not located more precisely, not dated
• Cold Creek settlement raid: battle, head of Cold Creek (now Castalia), June 2, 1813
• Treaty of Fort Industry cession of the Firelands: treaty, the Firelands of the Connecticut Western Reserve, whose western boundary the treaty line followed, 1805

Stories

Rogers' boiling spring

In September 1760, after the fall of Quebec, Major Robert Rogers of New Hampshire left Montreal with orders to take over the French posts in the west. He coasted Lake Erie in whaleboats, secured Detroit, and came back overland by the Sandusky and Tuscarawas trail to Fort Pitt, reaching Philadelphia in February 1761. The trail passed the head of Cold Creek, and Rogers wrote of 'a remarkable spring' rising from a small hill with such force that it boiled out of the ground in a column three feet high. He guessed it discharged ten hogsheads a minute. It is the earliest written description of the Castalia springs. (source)

A hole made by a mill dam

The Blue Hole did not exist when the first settlers came. Ver Steeg and Yunck concluded in 1932 that it was 'not more than one hundred and ten years old': about 1820 a dam in front of the church in the center of the village raised the upper pond, and the added pressure broke the thin rock over an underground cavern, which collapsed. The new spring rose and fell in step with the pond to the south. Early in 1914 a second cave-in widened it to about 75 feet. (source)

The creek that would not freeze

Cold Creek, running from the springs with a fall of 57 feet, powered mills from the first years of settlement. In 1832, remembered as the coldest winter in the region, it was the only stream still turning millstones for northern Ohio and southern Michigan. The next year Russell Heywood's Venice mill shipped what was hailed in New York as the first flour from Ohio, packed in barrels painted vermilion. When two Hancock County men arrived one Sunday after a week on the road with wheat for their sick families, Heywood asked the minister what to do and was told to grind it at once; for three weeks demand kept his mills running even on Sundays. (source)

Tracing the water with dye

Castalians long believed no one knew where the Blue Hole's water came from. The geologist E.L. Moseley poured corks and cork dust into sinkholes at Bellevue, nine miles south, but they never turned up at Castalia. Erie County health commissioner F.M. Houghtaling had a stronger reason to look: the Blue Hole's water grew gas-forming bacteria, and Bellevue had no sewers, draining its waste into holes drilled into caverns. He put a pound of dye into a toilet in Bellevue and found the water colored for three miles along the Bellevue-Castalia road, with a faint trace five miles out. He wrote that two or three pounds would have turned the Blue Hole bright green, but the expense stopped him. (source)

Bottomless, according to legend

According to local lore repeated for generations of visitors, the Blue Hole had no bottom, and anyone who fell in would never be seen again; some remembered stories of eyeless fish. In fact it is about 45 feet deep, and its water holds too little oxygen to keep fish alive. At its height about 165,000 people a year came to look into the clear blue pool; one Sandusky man remembered his mother buying honey in little souvenir bottles there. Trout club manager Steve Sessler said in 2014 that it closed in 1990 for financial reasons and falling attendance, with no safety concerns beyond the cost of meeting the Americans with Disabilities Act, that most of the facilities and fencing had been removed, and that it would never reopen to the public. (source)

Timeline

• 1760-61: Major Robert Rogers, returning overland from taking over Detroit (he left Montreal in September 1760 and reached Philadelphia in February 1761), passed the head of Cold Creek on the Sandusky-Tuscarawas trail and described a spring boiling out of a hillside in a column three feet high (a 1997 account dates his visit 1761). (source)
• 1805: The Treaty of Fort Industry ceded Native title to the Firelands, including the Castalia springs. (source)
• 1810: Docartus P. Snow of Vermont felled the first tree and built the first log house in the township, reportedly receiving 100 acres for building a grist mill on Cold Creek. (source)
• 1811: Maj. Frederick Falley bought the township from its Connecticut proprietors at 75 cents an acre. (source)
• 1812: Settlers meeting at Huron on July 4 renamed the township Margaretta, replacing the name of Indian trader Hugh Patterson. (source)
• 1813: On June 2 a raiding party attacked the Cold Creek settlement, then three houses, killing four and carrying women and children to British-held Detroit. (source)
• 1816: The village of Venice was founded at the mouth of Cold Creek and grew as a milling center. (source)
• 1820: About this year the Blue Hole broke open when a mill dam raised the water of the upper pond in Castalia and the rock above an underground cavity collapsed. (source)
• 1831: Russell H. Heywood of Buffalo bought the Venice mill, Cold Creek and 500 acres; he ran the mills for 48 years. (source)
• 1832: In an exceptionally cold winter every stream in the region froze except Cold Creek, and southern Michigan and northern Ohio depended on its mills for grinding. (source)
• 1836: Castalia was laid out as a village. (source)
• 1864: John Hoyt organized the Castalia Paper Company in the old cotton factory; the mill ran day and night until it burned in 1874. (source)
• 1868: Cold Creek was first stocked with speckled trout (the 1916 county history also credits John Hoyt with a trout hatching attempt beginning in 1870). (source)
• 1878: The Castalia Sporting Club was organized on September 18, leasing the waters for twenty years at $300 a year. (source)
• 1879: The Cold Creek Trout Club was organized, and its banking of the marshy edges first let visitors walk around the Blue Hole, which until then could be reached only by boat. (source)
• 1887: The trout club, renamed the Cold Creek Sporting Club, bought the property, buildings and forty acres for $20,000. (source)
• 1888: The stone mill built in 1839 on lower Cold Creek burned; by 1932 its ruins stood 70 feet from the cascades, which had retreated that far in 45 years. (source)
• 1889: The club bought 65 more acres and had an engineer lay out 'the crookedest trout stream in the world,' six miles of channel on 104 acres. (source)
• 1890: The Castalia Trout Club, owner of the Blue Hole ever since, was founded, according to a 2019 Ideastream report. (source)
• 1914: A second cave-in early in the year enlarged the Blue Hole to its present width of about 75 feet. (source)
• 1920s: The Blue Hole opened to the public as a roadside attraction on State Route 269. (source)
• 1930: About this year the Blue Hole Restaurant on Route 269 in the center of Castalia carried a sign pointing to the Blue Hole entrance 2,000 feet away. (source)
• 1932: College of Wooster geologists Karl Ver Steeg and George Yunck published a study sounding the Blue Hole at 43 to 45 feet and tracing its water to the Bellevue sinkholes. (source)
• 1990: The Blue Hole closed to the public for financial reasons, including falling attendance and the cost of meeting the Americans with Disabilities Act. (source)
• 2019: About 50 people toured the closed Blue Hole grounds on August 19 in an Erie MetroParks walk held by special permission. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Blue Hole (Castalia)
• en.wikipedia.org: Castalia, Ohio
• kb.osu.edu
• archive.org: standardhistoryo0001hews djvu.txt
• lkwdpl.org: buck07
• ideastream.org: oh really dives into the question of what happened to the blue hole
• eriecountyohiohistory.org: Castalias Blue Hole
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: view of castalia in 1930
• biographi.ca: orontony 3E
• en.wikipedia.org: Treaty of Fort Industry
• en.wikipedia.org: Firelands