Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  
  • 9
  •  
  • 10
  •  
  • 11
  •  
  • 12
  •  
  • 13
  •  
  • 14
  •  
  • 15
  •  
  • 16
  •  
  • 17
  •  
  • 18
  •  
  • 19
  •  
  • 20
  •  
  • 21
  •  
  • 22
  •  
  • 23
  •  
  • 24
  •  
  • 25
  •  
  • 26
  •  
  • 27
  •  
  • 28
  •  
  • 29
  •  
  • 30
  •  
  • 31
  •  
  • 32
  •  
  • 33
  •  
  • 34
  •  

OLD FORT SANDUSKY AND THE DE LERY PORTAGE

OLD FORT SANDUSKY AND THE DE LERY PORTAGE.

 

 

BY LUCY ELLIOT KEELER,

Local history has its renascence in tradition, which passes

along from generation to generation hints of names and adven-

tures, which appeal at last to some student of the past and send

him forth in quest of sources. Such traditions have long lingered

about the little peninsula at Port Clinton, in Ottawa County,

Ohio: traditions of venturesome French monks and traders; of

an ancient fort, destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again; of

British redcoats and Rangers, Pontiac's savages and Dalyell the

avenger; of Bradstreet; and finally of William Henry Harrison

building a brush fence to corral several thousand war horses,

while their riders sailed away on the ships of Commodore Per-

ry to finish, on the banks of the Canadian Thames, the one vic-

torious military campaign of the second American war with Great

Britain. The wealth of recent discoveries bestirred by such tra-

ditions materialized in the recent erection of two simple but

handsome monuments bearing six historical tablets which were

unveiled with interesting ceremonies at Port Clinton, on Memor-

ial Day, May 30, 1912.

Two pyramidal monuments of boulders stand two miles

apart, at either end of what is known as the "de Lery Portage

of 1754," formerly Fulton Street and Road; the one marking the

site of Old Fort Sandoski of 1745, faces Sandusky Bay, oppo-

site the mouth of the Sandusky River; the other the Harrison-

Perry Embarkation monument, overlooks Lake Erie near the

old mouth of the Portage River. These termini, together with

the short land portage connecting them, teem with history as

absorbing as any in this country; and it is most appropriate and

gratifying that they are finally worthily marked, and their story

narrated in enduring bronze for every passer-by to read.

The location of Old Fort Sandoski of 1745, the first fort

built by white men in Ohio, long a subject of earnest research,

(345)