Cedar Point

At a glance

Overview

Cedar Point is a sand peninsula about seven miles long that shelters the east side of Sandusky Bay, and the amusement park that has occupied it since 1870. For most of the 19th century the point was valued only for its timber and fishing rights; a lighthouse went up about 1839 and an army fort guarded the bay mouth from 1864. In 1870 Louis Zistel began ferrying Sandusky residents to a bathhouse and dancing on the lake shore, and in the 1880s B.F. Dwelle and his partners built a resort with a Grand Pavilion and, in 1892, a first roller coaster. From 1897 until his death in 1931 George A. Boeckling made it a national resort, opening the 600-room Hotel Breakers in 1905 and filling it by steamer and excursion train. After a long Depression-era decline, George Roose and Emile Legros rebuilt it from the late 1950s; since Magnum XL-200 in 1989 it has been known above all for record-setting roller coasters, and it has been owned by Six Flags since the 2024 Cedar Fair merger.

The name

Named for its cedar trees. An 1830 sale advertisement in the Sandusky Clarion already called the tract 'commonly called and known by the name of Cedar Point' and described it as principally covered with cedar, pine, oak, elm, whitewood and basswood, a good part of the cedar being fit for staves and shingles. (source)

Native American history

Nothing site-specific is recorded for the peninsula itself. The bay carries a Wyandot name: maps of 1720 and 1733 mark 'Lac Sandouske,' and Wyandot informants, including chief William Walker in 1835, gave its meaning as 'at the cold water.' About 1739-1748 a Wyandot (Huron) band under Orontony lived at the village of Etionnontout near Sandusky Bay, trading with British and Pennsylvania traders, until Orontony burned his fortified town in 1748 and moved to the Ohio valley. The peninsula lies in the Firelands, whose Native title was ceded to the United States by Ottawa, Potawatomi, Chippewa, Wyandot, Munsee, Delaware and Shawnee signers of the Treaty of Fort Industry on July 4, 1805.

• Etionnontout (Junundat), Orontony's Wyandot village: village, near Sandusky Bay; exact site not stated, c. 1739-1748
• 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

The lost Peninsula Point

In 1821 the entrance to Sandusky Bay was a strait no more than 100 rods wide, pinched between Cedar Point and Peninsula Point, a headland on the Marblehead side. B.F. Dwelle, later one of Cedar Point's resort founders, used to tell of standing on Peninsula Point with his rifle and shooting at geese on Cedar Point. The point rose fifteen feet in sand banks where foxes raised their young, backed by timber and prairie. Then the lake began eating into it, a marsh formed behind it, and a costly crib of rock and sand failed to hold it. By 1916 six to ten feet of water covered the spot. In 1867 Dwelle walked over it on the ice and could see the old crib through the clear ice. (source)

Louis Zistel's 25-cent boat

Louis Zistel was born in Germany in 1830 and came to Sandusky in 1848. He owned the first steam fishing tug on Sandusky Bay, and during the Civil War he held a government contract to carry Confederate prisoners to the prison on Johnson's Island. In 1870 he turned his boats to pleasure, ferrying Sandusky residents to Cedar Point, where they found a bathhouse, sandboxes and swings for children, and dancing for adults. The fare was 25 cents, and one of his steamers was the Young Reindeer. He also ran the Atlantic Garden, a boathouse saloon with an aquarium and a bear. Zistel died of throat cancer on March 3, 1889. (source)

Boeckling's resort

In 1897, with the resort losing money and its future in doubt, George A. Boeckling became a major stockholder and general manager of the newly formed Cedar Point Pleasure Resort Company. Born in Indiana, he had worked as an ice box salesman, a wholesale lumber dealer and a real estate agent. He built hotels: the 20-room Bay Shore in 1899, the 55-room White House in 1901, and in 1905 the Breakers, which after later additions offered nearly 1,000 rooms, with Tiffany glass in the lobby. A few years later he considered a 3,000-room hotel northwest of the Breakers that was never built. Railroads sold tens of thousands of Cedar Point excursion tickets a season, and on one Sunday in 1908 sixteen trains stood on the sidings near the Sandusky docks. Revenues rose from $110,000 in 1903 to over $1,000,000 by the time of World War I. (source)

Knute Rockne remembers Cedar Point

On March 4, 1925, Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne gave the address at a Sandusky Kiwanis banquet at the Elks Club, before a crowd of 250. City Solicitor Edmund H. Savord, a Notre Dame alumnus, introduced him. Rockne opened by recalling his summers working at Cedar Point, where his boss had been J.F. Singler. The priest who had married him, Rev. William F. Murphy, sat beside him at the speaker's table. Rockne named five components of success in football: brains, ambition, hard work, dependability and proper psychology. Members of the Sandusky High School football and basketball teams were in the audience, and the Sandusky Register called it the best address scholastic athletes there had ever heard. (source)

A lighthouse without a light

The limestone lighthouse of 1862 guided ships into Sandusky Bay until 1904, when its range lights were discontinued and the house lost its tower and lantern room. The Coast Guard kept the station as a buoy depot, a radio beacon station from 1932, and a search and rescue boat station until 1975. Frank Ritter, who kept the nearby bay range lights from 1893 to 1929, is credited with saving many lives, and had to row to the Marblehead life-saving station to raise an alarm because there was no telephone. After the park bought the land in 1987, planners restored the lighthouse as the center of a cottage colony, Lighthouse Point, which opened in 2001. (source)

Timeline

• 1821: Peninsula Point, a sandy headland across the bay mouth from Cedar Point, still stood fifteen feet above the water; it later washed away despite a protective crib of rock and sand. (source)
• 1830: F. Devoe advertised the 1,200-acre Cedar Point tract for sale in the Sandusky Clarion, praising its cedar, its hay prairies and its fishing ground. (source)
• 1837: Congress appropriated $2,500 for a beacon light on Cedar Point to mark the entrance to Sandusky Bay, adding $3,000 in 1838. (source)
• 1839: The first Cedar Point Lighthouse, a stone dwelling with an octagonal tower on its roof, was completed (Wikipedia gives 1838; the 1916 county history says about 1840). (source)
• 1849: Owner A.M. Porter advertised that anyone fishing on Cedar Point must pay him one-eighth of the catch; the Ohio Supreme Court found fishing leases were still its only value in 1878. (source)
• 1862: Work began on a larger limestone lighthouse, about ten feet taller than the first, which received the old lantern room and lens. (source)
• 1864: Army engineers, with soldiers of the 128th Ohio doing most of the work, built a fort on Cedar Point at the mouth of Sandusky Bay, opposite the Johnson's Island prison. (source)
• 1870: Louis Zistel began ferrying Sandusky residents to a bathhouse, swings and dancing on Cedar Point for 25 cents a trip. (source)
• 1882: B.F. Dwelle leased the point from its owners, Mrs. Adolph and Mr. Stoll, built a dock and bathhouses, and the steamboat Hayes began frequent trips across the bay. (source)
• 1887: The first Cedar Point Pleasure Resort Company was formed, with the Kuebeler brewing family among the large shareholders. (source)
• 1888: The Grand Pavilion opened, a theater and concert hall seating 4,000, with bowling alleys, a ladies pavilion and a photo studio nearby. (source)
• 1892: The Switchback Railway, Cedar Point's first roller coaster, opened. (source)
• 1897: The Cedar Point Pleasure Resort Company was reported incorporated under Indiana law with $250,000 in capital, its original holders A.J. Stoll, Charles Baetz, Jacob Kuebeler, Louis Adolph and B.F. Dwelle. (source)
• 1899: The 20-room Bay Shore Hotel opened near the steamboat dock, the resort's first hotel. (source)
• 1901: Boeckling opened the 55-room White House hotel overlooking Sandusky Bay. (source)
• 1904: The Cedar Point range lights were discontinued, and the lighthouse soon lost its tower and lantern room. (source)
• 1905: The Hotel Breakers opened on June 12 with 600 rooms, designed by the architectural firm Knox & Elliott. (source)
• 1906: The Coliseum, with a large upstairs ballroom, was built on the new midway. (source)
• 1909: The 155-foot steamer G.A. Boeckling, built for 2,000 passengers, was christened June 26 and began the Sandusky-Cedar Point run the next day. (source)
• 1913: Knute Rockne and Gus Dorais, working summer jobs on the beach, practiced the forward pass at Cedar Point. (source)
• 1914: The first road reached the resort section of the peninsula; until then visitors arrived only by water. (source)
• 1929: The Cyclone, a wooden coaster with a 72-foot lift hill designed by Harry Traver, opened. (source)
• 1931: George A. Boeckling died on July 24 and was buried in Oakland Cemetery, Sandusky. (source)
• 1951: The G.A. Boeckling made her last Cedar Point trip over Labor Day weekend. (source)
• 1956: Land developers George Roose and Emile Legros bought Cedar Point, aiming to make it the 'Disneyland of the Midwest' (Wikipedia places Roose's takeover around 1958). (source)
• 1957: The Cedar Point Causeway was built; it is still the park's main road link. (source)
• 1964: The Blue Streak, now the park's oldest operating roller coaster, opened, named for Sandusky High School's teams. (source)
• 1975: The Coast Guard moved its Cedar Point boat station duties to Marblehead and the old light station went unused. (source)
• 1983: Cedar Fair Limited Partnership was formed as the parent company of Cedar Point and Valleyfair. (source)
• 1987: The park bought the former Coast Guard corner of the peninsula, lighthouse included, for $425,000 on October 28. (source)
• 1989: Magnum XL-200 opened as the world's tallest and fastest roller coaster, the first to pass 200 feet. (source)
• 2000: Millennium Force, 310 feet tall with a 93 mph top speed, opened as the tallest and fastest complete-circuit coaster in the world. (source)
• 2001: The National Park Service withdrew Hotel Breakers' National Historic Landmark designation on August 7, after demolished original wings and other alterations cost it its historic integrity. (source)
• 2003: Top Thrill Dragster opened as the world's tallest and fastest coaster, 420 feet and 120 mph. (source)
• 2024: Cedar Fair merged with Six Flags on July 1, and Six Flags Entertainment Corporation took over Cedar Point. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Cedar Point
• en.wikipedia.org: Cedar Point Light (Ohio)
• en.wikipedia.org: Hotel Breakers
• en.wikipedia.org: George Arthur Boeckling
• lighthousefriends.com: light
• nps.gov: hotel breakers
• archive.org: standardhistoryo0001hews djvu.txt
• rbhayes.org: cedar point and characteristics of resorts..gilded age
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: louis zistel early german immigrant
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: cedar point grew along with middle
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: knute rockne addressed sandusky kiwanis
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: biemillers cove
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: the ga boeckling
• sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com: ga boeckling cedar point visionary
• kb.osu.edu
• biographi.ca: orontony 3E
• en.wikipedia.org: Treaty of Fort Industry
• en.wikipedia.org: Firelands