Put-in-Bay and Perry's Victory Memorial

At a glance

Overview

South Bass Island is the southernmost of the three Bass Islands in western Lake Erie, and Put-in-Bay is the village on its harbor. In August and September 1813 Master Commandant Oliver Hazard Perry used the bay as the anchorage for his squadron, and on September 10, 1813 he sailed out and captured the entire British squadron under Robert Heriot Barclay a few miles to the northwest in the Battle of Lake Erie. After 1854 the island's new owner, Jose de Rivera, cut it into small farms, planted it with vineyards worked largely by German immigrants, and encouraged the steamboat and hotel trade that made Put-in-Bay one of the largest summer resorts on the Great Lakes, crowned by the 625-room Hotel Victory (1892 to 1919). Between 1912 and 1915 an interstate commission of nine states and the federal government built the 352-foot Doric column of Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial on the island's isthmus, where six officers killed in the battle, three American and three British, now lie beneath the rotunda. The National Park Service has run the memorial since 1936, and the village remains a seasonal resort reached by ferry and small plane.

The name

Two explanations were current by 1898. One, credited to an unnamed historian, holds that Put-in-Bay is a corruption of 'Pudding Bay', a name given by early navigators. The other, which Theresa Thorndale called the generally accepted one, is that the name came from Perry's squadron 'putting in' to the wide bay before the Battle of Lake Erie. The island itself was once called Ross Island, and is mapped as South Bass because it is the southernmost of the Bass group. (source)

How the land formed

Theresa Thorndale's 1898 account describes the Lake Erie islands as what remains above the lake of a long, narrow upheaval she calls the 'Cincinnati Anti-Clinal' (the Cincinnati Arch). The island is built of limestone that is honeycombed with solution caves, several of which hold pools of clear water that rise and fall with the lake; Perry's Cave, about 40 feet below the surface and about 200 by 165 feet, is the largest known, and Crystal Cave, opened in the late 1890s, was found in connection with extensive strontia (strontium) deposits. Glacial grooves and striations scored by the last ice sheet are exposed on the south shore. Thorndale's 1898 account assigned the rock to the 'Niagara group'; that older stratigraphic name is reported here as she gave it. (source)

Native American history

No named village is recorded on South Bass Island itself. James Smith, a captive living with Wyandot and Ottawa families in the 1750s, wrote that some Wyandots or Ottawas often spent their winter hunt on the chain of islands lying 'in a line across the lake', trapping raccoons that fed on wild rice in the island marshes, and that the islands were seldom visited in summer because of rattlesnakes; he never landed on them himself and does not name a particular island. Nineteenth-century island writers recorded stone axes, pestles and flint points turned up by plows at Put-in-Bay, a stone-slab burial holding eight skeletons found beneath a large stump, and human bones in a limestone fissure on the south shore near the lighthouse; these accounts are unscientific and their 'Mound Builder' and giant-skeleton claims are not reliable. Thorndale described the islands around 1800 as a shared seasonal ground for Seneca, Miami, Ottawa, Shawnee, Potawatomi and especially Wyandot people rather than the territory of one nation. In modern times, two National Park Service archeological surveys of the memorial grounds in 1993 found three sites with remains, two of them prehistoric, all in ground badly disturbed when early twentieth-century construction turned the marshy isthmus into raised terraces. At the battle itself, Barclay's squadron sailed from Fort Malden, where large numbers of Indian warriors and their families allied with Britain under Tecumseh were being supplied; the American victory led directly to the Battle of the Thames, where Tecumseh was killed. No treaty cession specific to the island was found in published sources.

• Winter hunting grounds on the Lake Erie island chain: camp, The islands 'in a line across the lake' from the Sandusky shore (island not named), 1750s
• Stone-slab burial and cave and fissure burials reported at Put-in-Bay: burial, South Bass Island; one fissure on the south shore near the lighthouse, undated; reported before 1898
• Prehistoric sites found in NPS archeological surveys of the memorial grounds: other, Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial grounds, prehistoric; surveyed 1993

Stories

Don't Give Up the Ship

Perry flew a dark battle flag sewn with the words 'DONT GIVE UP THE SHIP', the dying order of his friend Captain James Lawrence of the USS Chesapeake. On September 10, 1813 his flagship, the brig Lawrence, closed with the British line while her sister brig Niagara, under Jesse Elliott, hung back out of carronade range. By 2:30 p.m. the Lawrence was a wreck, every starboard gun disabled and four of every five men killed or wounded. Perry hauled down the flag, took four unwounded men into a cutter and rowed through the fire to the Niagara. He sailed her straight through the British line just as the Detroit and Queen Charlotte fouled each other, firing both broadsides. A few minutes after 3 p.m. the British vessels surrendered one by one, and Perry wrote to General Harrison in pencil on the back of an old envelope: 'We have met the enemy and they are ours.' (source)

Six officers under one floor

After the battle the dead enlisted men of both fleets were committed to Lake Erie. On September 11, 1813, the two crews held a joint service and buried six officers, three American and three British, a few yards from the shore of South Bass Island, in what is now the village park; a willow tree marked the spot until it decayed and fell. The officers were Lieutenant John Brooks, Midshipman Henry Laub and Midshipman John Clark on the American side and Captain Robert Finnis, Lieutenant James Garden and Lieutenant John Garland on the British side. A hundred years later, at the September 1913 centennial, their remains were moved to the half-built memorial, where they lie beneath the rotunda floor. Perry himself, who died of yellow fever in 1819, is buried in Newport, Rhode Island. (source)

Rivera's island

In July 1854 the Edwards family sold South Bass, Gibraltar and neighboring islands to Jose de Rivera St. Jurgo, a New York importer. He tried sheep first, then had the soil analyzed and in 1858 began planting grapes, selling or leasing five- and ten-acre lots to settlers, and helped German immigrants buy land to plant vineyards. He gave land for the first school, the first church and the island cemetery, and deeded the waterfront park on condition it stay free to the public. He also opened the island's largest cave to tourists. His son's attempt to corner the sugar market in 1886 cost him most of his fortune, and he is buried in the cemetery on land he gave. His origins are told two ways: an Ohio historical marker says he was born in Barcelona, Spain, while Ruth Moizuk's island history calls him Puerto Rican. (source)

The Hotel Victory

The cornerstone of the Hotel Victory was laid on the anniversary of the battle, September 10, 1889, and the hotel opened in June 1892 on six acres 80 feet above the water. Its builder was J. K. Tillison. A period description reprinted in Ruth Moizuk's island history gives it 625 guest rooms, a main dining hall 155 feet long and 52 feet high, seating for 1,200 at one sitting, three elevators and 6,000 electric lights. The hotel ran its own electric streetcar line from the boat landings, powered by its own plant, and island tradition holds it was the first hotel to let men and women swim together. It closed around 1911, was being remodeled with some 300 workers in 1918, reopened in 1919, and burned to the ground on August 14, 1919. Pieces of its foundation and pool remain in the South Bass Island state park campground. (source)

The Confederates at Middle Bass

On September 19, 1864, Confederate agents led by John Yates Beall took over the steamer Philo Parsons on Lake Erie as part of a plot to free the Confederate officers held on Johnson's Island in Sandusky Bay. At Middle Bass, while the Parsons was taking on wood, the island steamer Island Queen came alongside on her run from Sandusky to Put-in-Bay and Toledo with nearly 100 passengers, including 40 or 50 soldiers going home to be mustered out. The raiders jumped aboard, shot engineer Henry Haines in the face, put the passengers ashore under a pledge of silence and scuttled the Queen off Ballast Island. The plot failed when the gunboat Michigan and the Johnson's Island guards were warned, and Put-in-Bay spent a night under arms. Captain George Orr later found his steamer aground in about ten feet of water on a reef, plugged the cut feed pipe himself and had her pumped out and towed to Kelleys Island. (source)

Timeline

• 1750s: Captive James Smith records that Wyandot or Ottawa hunters often winter on the western Lake Erie islands, trapping as many as a thousand raccoons each in a season. (source)
• 1810: Alexander Ewen, the first known white resident, has about 1,000 hogs roaming South Bass Island. (source)
• 1813: On August 16 Perry's squadron arrives and anchors in Put-in-Bay, from which it trains and watches the British at Fort Malden. (source)
• 1813: On September 10 Perry's nine vessels sail from Put-in-Bay at 7 a.m., the Detroit fires the first shot at 11:45, and a few minutes after 3 p.m. the six British vessels surrender. (source)
• 1813: On September 11 the crews of both fleets bury six officers, three American and three British, together a few yards from the shore of South Bass Island. (source)
• 1836: Alfred P. Edwards buys the Bass Islands at a sheriff's sale in Huron County for $6,298 and builds a two-story house later enlarged into the Put-in-Bay House hotel. (source)
• 1852: Promoters first propose a Perry monument, suggesting Gibraltar Island as its site. (source)
• 1854: On July 12 the Edwards family sells South Bass and neighboring islands to New York merchant Jose de Rivera, who has South Bass surveyed and subdivided. (source)
• 1858: Rivera, after first running some 2,000 sheep, begins planting grapes, the start of the island's wine industry. (source)
• 1862: John Brown Jr., son of the abolitionist, settles at Put-in-Bay to grow grapes and lives there until his death in 1895. (source)
• 1864: Financier Jay Cooke buys Gibraltar Island in the bay for $3,001 and completes his Italianate summer house on it in 1865. (source)
• 1864: On September 19 Confederate agents under John Yates Beall seize the steamer Philo Parsons and then, at Middle Bass, the island steamer Island Queen in a failed plot to free prisoners on Johnson's Island, and scuttle the Island Queen. (source)
• 1868: Rivera deeds the lakefront park, now De Rivera Park, to the island on condition that it stay free to the public. (source)
• 1877: Put-in-Bay is incorporated as a village. (source)
• 1889: On September 10 the cornerstone of the Hotel Victory is laid. (source)
• 1891: On September 10 former President Rutherford B. Hayes leads a Maumee Valley Monumental Association meeting at Put-in-Bay, with Cassius M. Clay among those present, to press again for a Perry monument. (source)
• 1892: The Hotel Victory opens in June with 625 guest rooms and a dining capacity of 1,200 at one sitting. (source)
• 1895: Ohio State University founds its Lake Laboratory, the oldest freshwater biological field station in the United States; in 1925 Julius Stone buys Gibraltar Island from the Cooke family and gives it to the university, and the lab is renamed for his father Franz Stone. (source)
• 1897: The South Bass Island Light, a Queen Anne brick dwelling attached to a 60-foot tower, is first lit. (source)
• 1910: On September 10 an Interstate Board of nine states forms at Put-in-Bay to plan a centennial memorial, largely through the efforts of Columbus journalist Webster P. Huntington. (source)
• 1912: The design of Joseph H. Freedlander and Alexander D. Seymour Jr. is chosen from 82 qualifying entries, the first design competition judged by the new U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. (source)
• 1913: On July 4 the memorial cornerstone is laid, and on September 11 the six officers' remains are moved in procession from the shore to a tomb beneath the rotunda floor. (source)
• 1915: On June 13 the column opens to the public without ceremony, and 22,000 paying visitors ride its elevator before the season closes September 16. (source)
• 1919: On March 3 Congress accepts title to the memorial, which Ohio had ceded to the United States. (source)
• 1919: On August 14 the Hotel Victory, reopened that season under new management, burns to the ground. (source)
• 1931: The memorial is formally dedicated on July 31. (source)
• 1936: Milton Hersberger buys the first Ford Tri-Motor for air service to the islands, the start of what was billed as the shortest airline in the world. (source)
• 1936: On June 2 Congress designates the site Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial National Monument and the National Park Service takes over. (source)
• 1972: The site is renamed a national memorial and reaches 25.38 acres under federal control. (source)
• 2006: In June a 500-pound piece of granite falls about 315 feet from the observation deck; no one is hurt and the memorial reopens August 26. (source)
• 2024: A seawall rebuilding begun in April 2022 is finished in July, replacing about 1,900 feet of north seawall and 1,500 feet of south seawall. (source)

Sources

• en.wikipedia.org: Put in Bay, Ohio
• en.wikipedia.org: South Bass Island
• en.wikipedia.org: Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial
• en.wikipedia.org: Battle of Lake Erie
• nps.gov: pevi memorial
• nps.gov: battle erie detail
• nps.gov: completion of seawall
• npgallery.nps.gov: 15000185 text
• archive.org: culturallandscap00will djvu.txt
• archive.org: putinbaystory00moiz djvu.txt
• archive.org: sketchesstorieso00thor djvu.txt
• archive.org: accountremark00smitrich djvu.txt
• gutenberg.org
• ohiohistorycentral.org: Battle of Lake Erie
• ohiohistorycentral.org: Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial
• remarkableohio.org: 13 62 joseph de rivera st jurgo 1813 1889
• remarkableohio.org: 8 62 gibraltar island
• remarkableohio.org: 14 62 jay cooke mansion
• remarkableohio.org: 9 62 south bass island light
• remarkableohio.org: 16 62 worlds shortest airline
• rbhayes.org: paper trail display