Kelleys Island

At a glance

Overview

Kelleys Island is the largest American island in Lake Erie, about 2,800 acres of Devonian limestone lying north of Sandusky, and the village of Kelleys Island covers all of it. Native people fished and camped here for centuries and carved more than one hundred figures into Inscription Rock on the south shore, probably within the last thousand years. After a string of traders and squatters, brothers Datus and Irad Kelley of the Cleveland area began buying the island, then called Cunningham's Island, in 1833 at $1.50 an acre and renamed it for their family in 1840. Their quarries, red cedar, orchards and vineyards drew immigrants from Germany, Ireland, Italy and eastern Europe, and the Kelley Island Lime & Transport Company grew into one of the largest limestone producers in the world before its island quarries closed around 1940. Quarrying destroyed most of the island's glacial grooves, but one section on the north shore, preserved since the 1890s and in state hands since the 1920s or 1930s, was called by Ohio Historical Society signs the most famous glacial grooves in the world, and the whole island is a National Register historic district.

The name

Maps of the late 1700s show it as Sandusky Island, and a survey completed in 1806 designated it Island Number 6. It was later called Cunningham's Island after a man named Cunningham who, according to legend, was its first European American resident; Wikipedia notes that the Cunningham's Island name and legend may first have belonged to present-day Catawba Island. It was renamed Kelleys Island in 1840 by Datus and Irad Kelley, who had bought nearly the whole island. (source)

How the land formed

The island is made of Middle Devonian (Eifelian Stage) carbonate rock: the intensely dolomitized, sparsely fossiliferous Lucas Dolostone, laid down on coastal mudflats, and above it the Columbus Limestone, whose Bellepoint, Marblehead and Venice members accumulated as muddy shoals, lagoons and open shallow sea, with rugose corals, gastropods, rostroconchs and brachiopods. During the Pleistocene the Laurentide Ice Sheet scoured the rock; at Glacial Grooves State Memorial giant grooves lie in a depression about 30 feet wide and 15 feet deep, exposed for about 390 feet, straight and striated at the east end and far more tortuous to the west. How they were cut is argued: Munro-Stasiuk and others (2005) hold that the grooves and their depression were eroded by turbulent, high-velocity, sediment-laden meltwater flowing beneath the ice. (source)

Native American history

Kelleys Island has one of the best-known rock art sites in the Great Lakes. Inscription Rock, a limestone slab about 32 by 21 feet on the south shore, carries more than one hundred carved figures, including human figures and pipe-smoking groups. The Ohio History Connection dates the carvings to roughly A.D. 1200 to 1600 and says they are probably less than a thousand years old, likely the work of the Late Prehistoric Sandusky tradition or of Native people living in the region during early European contact; older interpretations credited the Erie, and the Kelleys Island Historical Association suggests either Algonquian groups tied to the 'Fire Nation', who held the Sandusky region until about 1643, or roving Iroquoian bands. A second petroglyph boulder on the north shore, carved with pipe-smoking figures, was blasted apart by quarry workers in the mid-1800s. Island writers of the 1890s reported earthworks, one enclosing nearly seven acres on the Huntington property, and a large village site at the Addison Kelley home that yielded pottery, pipes and stone tools; the historical association places the remains of at least two villages very near Inscription Rock, and Ohio Historical Society signs speak of at least two villages on the island. The island chamber of commerce says there were no year-round villages, only sites visited each spring and fall for fishing, so the evidence on permanent settlement conflicts. Around 1800 the Lake Erie islands were a shared seasonal ground for Wyandot, Ottawa, Seneca, Miami, Shawnee and Potawatomi people, and early white settlers were driven off at the outbreak of the War of 1812. No treaty cession specific to the island was found; the island was counted in Connecticut's Western Reserve.

• Inscription Rock: rock art, South shore, near East Lakeshore Drive and Addison Road, c. A.D. 1200 to 1600 (Ohio History Connection)
• North Bay petroglyph boulder (destroyed): rock art, North shore of the island, prehistoric; destroyed mid-1800s
• Village site at the Addison Kelley residence: village, Near the south shore, undated; reported 1898
• Earthwork on the Huntington property: earthwork, Kelleys Island (exact site not given), undated; reported 1898

Stories

The outlaw of Cunningham's Island

In April 1833 Benjamin Napier, described in a 1925 Plain Dealer account as a giant of more than six feet, landed at the south wharf from a schooner with six armed men and announced that the island was his. He ordered the handful of settlers off, took over Elisha Ellis's cabin, herded their cattle onto his pastures and shot their pigs from the trees. The settlers held no real title and could not legally remove him. Agents for the absentee owners met at Norwalk, and the Kelley brothers were persuaded to buy much of the island, including the land under Napier's stolen cabin, and then had him legally ejected. Long litigation showed he had no claim or even a shadow of an equity to any of the island. He kept hanging around and committing lawless acts until he was arrested, and with a prison term hanging over him he left and was never seen again. (source)

Inscription Rock

The great slab on the south shore was found partly buried in the sand in 1833 by Charles Olmstead, who had come to study the glacial grooves. Around 1850 or 1851 Army officer and artist Seth Eastman made careful measured drawings for Henry Rowe Schoolcraft's federal study of the Indian tribes, and copies were shown to Shingvauk, a Native interpreter of picture-writing. Schoolcraft called it the most extensive and best-preserved inscription of its kind yet found in America and read into it a history of the Erie, the Wyandot and the Iroquois conquest, while the Ohio History Connection now considers the carvings more likely the work of the Late Prehistoric Sandusky tradition or of peoples of the early contact period. The soft limestone wore quickly under weather and visitors' feet; in 1885 Addison Kelley and others filled in the carvings so they could be photographed, and by 1898 a writer warned they would soon be gone. The Ohio Historical Society roofed the rock in 1969, and a partial replica of the 1850s drawings stands at the site because the carvings themselves are now hard to see. (source)

Stone for the Great Lakes

The quarries began with John Clemons, who arrived in 1830 and shipped building stone from a dock at North Bay, and the Kelleys, who stripped the thin soil from nearly pure bluish-white limestone. Early crews drilled and blasted with hand tools and black powder, and hauled the stone by wagon to docks where it was sold by the cord. Kelleys Island stone went into churches, breakwaters and piers in Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo and into the first American lock at Sault Ste. Marie in 1875. The Kelley Island Lime & Transport Company bought up many of the small quarries, tied them together with a rail network and by 1900 employed more than 500 men, many recruited from Ireland, Italy and eastern Europe, at 16 limekilns. Changes in the building-stone trade and the Great Depression closed the company's island quarries, and its last loads shipped just before World War II; quarrying went on under other owners, and in 2004 Lafarge bought the 200-acre Kellstone quarry. (source)

The grooves the quarrymen spared

Glacial grooves once ran across much of the north side of the island, and quarrying cut, burned and shipped most of them away, including the 'Great Grooves', which ran at least 2,000 feet and were as much as 15 feet deep and 30 feet wide. In 1892 the Kelley Island Lime & Transport Company set aside a small piece of quarry land to protect one of the last sections. A slab of grooved rock was cut out and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. The Ohio Historical Society's 1977 signs said the society had administered the three-and-a-half-acre memorial since 1932, while the island historical association dates state protection to 1923. When the grooves were first uncovered from under several feet of soil, some surfaces carried a high polish that weathered away soon after exposure. (source)

A village that read its own newspaper aloud

In 1861 Datus and Sara Kelley paid for a town hall and dedicated it to the community on their 50th wedding anniversary. Each winter from 1861 to 1877 islanders produced the Islander, a hand-written weekly of family histories, play reviews, weddings, funerals, jokes and essays, and read it aloud on Saturday evenings to audiences of up to 300 at Kelley's Hall. As the population grew, the one-room schoolhouse became four school districts and later one large brick school, and the Catholic church, first held in the Lange house, became the first of five churches on the island. Islanders fished for blue pike and whitefish with pound nets and later gill nets, and grew the Catawba, Niagara and Isabella grapes that made Kelleys Island wines known across the country. (source)

Timeline

• c. 1200-1600: Native people carve more than one hundred figures into the limestone of Inscription Rock on the south shore. (source)
• 1808: A trader named Cunningham builds a cabin and trades blankets, beads and whiskey with Native campers for maple sugar and furs, until a fight drives him to the mainland (other accounts date his arrival to about 1800 or 1803). (source)
• 1812: The few white settlers leave the island at the outbreak of war; General William Henry Harrison later posts a guard on the west shore to watch the lake, and cedar tent stakes from the camp still stood in 1828. (source)
• c. 1817: The island passes to the Connecticut Land Company and is divided into 13 lots given to stockholders. (source)
• 1818: A man named Killam starts a wood yard to supply red cedar to the Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamer on Lake Erie, and leaves after she is wrecked in 1821. (source)
• 1830: John Clemons and his brother open the island's first quarry on the north shore limestone ledges and build a dock at North Bay. (source)
• 1833: In April the armed squatter Ben Napier lands with six men, declares himself owner and seizes the Ellis cabin; the same year Datus and Irad Kelley are persuaded to begin buying the island. (source)
• 1833: Charles Olmstead of Connecticut finds Inscription Rock partly buried in the shore sand while studying the glacial grooves. (source)
• 1840: The island is organized as a township and renamed Kelley's Island. (source)
• 1842: Charles Carpenter, Datus Kelley's son-in-law, begins growing grapes for wine on the island. (source)
• 1850-1851: Seth Eastman of the U.S. Army, detailed by the federal government, draws the carvings on Inscription Rock (Thorndale gives 1851; a later touring guide gives 1850). (source)
• 1861: Datus and Sara Kelley pay for a stone town hall and dedicate it to the community on their 50th wedding anniversary; the hand-written weekly Islander, read aloud there, runs from 1861 to 1877. (source)
• 1864: In September the scuttled steamer Island Queen, seized by Confederate raiders, is refloated and towed to Kelleys Island. (source)
• 1866: The German Reformed congregation, organized in 1865, builds its church of island stone; it holds its last service in 1942, and the Kelleys Island Historical Association receives its deed in 1986. (source)
• 1872: The Kelley's Island Wine Company is established; it becomes one of the largest wineries in the country before fires during Prohibition destroy it. (source)
• 1875: Island dimension stone is used in the first American lock at Sault Ste. Marie, as well as in breakwaters, churches and buildings in Cleveland, Detroit and Buffalo. (source)
• 1885: Addison Kelley and others fill in the carvings on Inscription Rock so they can be photographed before they wear away. (source)
• 1886: The Kelley Island Lime & Transport Company is formed and begins buying up the island's small quarries (one Wikipedia article gives 1896). (source)
• 1887: Kelleys Island is incorporated as a village. (source)
• 1892: The Kelley Island Lime & Transport Company sets aside a small section of quarry land to preserve one of the last glacial grooves. (source)
• c. 1900: The island's permanent population exceeds 2,000, most of them working in the quarries, vineyards and wineries. (source)
• 1918: The island quarrying industry reaches its peak. (source)
• 1932: The Ohio Historical Society begins administering the three-and-a-half-acre Glacial Grooves State Memorial (the island historical association gives 1923 as the start of state protection). (source)
• 1941: Most of the island's quarries have closed, undercut by cheaper stone from newly opened quarries in Michigan. (source)
• 1950s: With Prohibition, quarry closings and the collapse of commercial fishing behind it, the year-round population falls below 100. (source)
• 1956: Kelleys Island State Park is established on the north side of the island. (source)
• 1969: The Ohio Historical Society builds a roof over Inscription Rock to slow its erosion. (source)
• 1973: Inscription Rock is listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 18. (source)
• 1975: A 23-acre Kelleys Island South Shore District is listed on the National Register; in 1988 it is renamed the Kelleys Island Historic District and expanded to the whole island. (source)
• 2004: Lafarge North America buys the 200-acre Kellstone quarry, which can produce more than a million tons of limestone a year. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Kelleys Island, Ohio
• en.wikipedia.org: Inscription Rock (Kelleys Island, Ohio)
• en.wikipedia.org: Kelleys Island State Park
• en.wikipedia.org: Kelley Island Lime %26 Transport Company
• ohiohistory.org: inscription rock petroglyphs
• ohiohistorycentral.org: Inscription Rock
• kelleysislandhistorical.org: inscription rock
• kelleysislandhistorical.org: glacial grooves
• kelleysislandhistorical.org: about kelleys island
• kelleysislandchamber.com: island history
• files.usgwarchives.org: 1925.txt
• rbhayes.org: paper trail display
• touring-ohio.com: kelleys island
• archive.org: sketchesstorieso00thor djvu.txt
• case.edu: kelley irad
• case.edu: kelley datus
• remarkableohio.org: 31 22 the island house
• remarkableohio.org: 29 22 the german reformed church the church parsonage
• commons.wikimedia.org: File:Glacial grooves from Pleistocene glaciation on Columbus Limestone (Middle Devonian
• commons.wikimedia.org: File:Columbus Limestone (Middle Devonian; abandoned quarry, Kelleys Island, Lake Erie,