Discover Sandusky

Sandusky sits on a bay on the Lake Erie shore, roughly midway along the Ohio shore of the lake, west of Cleveland, and it has been a resort town for a century and a half. Its downtown grid was laid out in 1818 in a pattern of diagonals and squares that local tradition attributes to Masonic symbolism, and the limestone quarried nearby built much of it.

The town is best known for Cedar Point, on a peninsula reaching into the lake. Opened in 1870, it is one of the oldest amusement parks in North America and holds among the largest collections of roller coasters anywhere in the world, several of which were the tallest or fastest on earth when they were built. It runs from May to the end of October and is the reason the town’s summer population multiplies.

The Lake Erie Islands are the other draw, reached by ferry from the docks: Put-in-Bay on South Bass, with Perry’s Victory Memorial commemorating the naval battle of 1813 and a summer scene that is entirely its own; and Kelleys Island, quieter, with glacial grooves scoured into the limestone that are among the best exposed anywhere. Walleye and yellow perch fishing on the lake is a serious business here. Note that the site records this town as Sanduski; the standard spelling is Sandusky.