A Trip to Put-in-Bay

The library's historical collections contain photographs of young ladies from Sandusky visiting South Bass Island in 1919 and 1920. Pictured below are Ruth Beach, Helen Rheinegger and Verna Bornhauser, who were all in their late teens at the time. 

    

The young ladies also visited Hotel Victory during their visit in 1919. They posed for a snapshot on the ladder of the (apparently empty) hotel swimming pool. Sadly, the Hotel Victory was destroyed by fire on August 14, 1919.

  

On May 22, 1920, Verna Bornhauser and Dorothy Sturm posed on the barrel of a cannon in the park at Put-in-Bay.

                      

This picture was taken on the road to a visit to the state fish hatcheries:

Residents of Sandusky were fortunate to have easy access to steamboat transportation to the Lake Erie Islands. The Frank Kirby was just one of the steamers that ferried passengers to Put-in-Bay in 1919 and 1920.

Excursions on Lake Erie in 1912

Retired lake freighter captain, Wendell Parry, donated the poster which advertised Toledo Excursions on the Steamer Arrow. On the Sundays of September 15, 22, and 29 in 1912, the Arrow took passengers on an excursion to the Lake Erie Islands and Toledo. The Arrow left Sandusky at 7:30 a.m., and left Toledo at 4:30 p.m. Round trip fare for the excursions was fifty cents (about $12.60 in today's money). These steamer excursions gave local residents a break from the summer heat, for a very reasonable price. Pictured below is the Arrow at the foot of Columbus Avenue in the early twentieth century.

The Frank E. Kirby also ferried passengers to the Lake Erie Islands area in Detroit in the summer of 1912. The seating capacity on the Frank E. Kirby was 3500.  Round trip fares from Sandusky to Detroit cost seventy five cents.

Before it was the custom for almost every middle class family to own and operate an automobile, the steamers on Lake Erie provided inexpensive transportation for summertime fun for hundreds of residents of the North Coast.

Steamer Frank E. Kirby

Sandusky photographer Ernst Niebergall took this picture of the steamer Frank E. Kirby in the first quarter of the twentieth century.   The Frank E. Kirby was built in Wyandotte, Michigan by the Detroit Dry Dock Company in 1890. Notes in our historical files indicate that the Frank E. Kirby travelled between Detroit and Sandusky, with stops at Kelleys Island, Put-in-Bay, and Middle Bass Island, until the end of 1919. Pictured below are members of the Silver Bell Benefit Club aboard the Frank E. Kirby. On Sunday, June 14, 1908, the members of the club traveled on the Frank E. Kirby to Detroit, to see the baseball game between the Detroit Tigers and the Philadelphia Athletics.

Visit the Sandusky Library Archives Research Center to see hundreds of vintage photographs from Sandusky and Erie County.