KELLEYS ISLAND is about nine miles north of Sandusky, in the western basin of Lake Erie. Seven miles across at its widest, it's the largest American island on the lake, but it's also one of the most peaceful and picturesque, home to just 175 permanent residents. The whole island, green, sleepy and with few buildings less than a century old, is a National Historic District. Its seventy-plus archeological sites include Inscription Rock , a limestone slab carved with four-hundred-year-old pictographs, east of the dock on the southern shore. The Glacial Grooves State Memorial , on the west shore, is a four-hundred-foot trough of solid limestone, scoured with deep ridges by the glacier that carved the Great Lakes.

Settled in the 1830s, Kelleys was initially a working island, its economy based on lumber, then wine, and later limestone quarrying. All but the last have collapsed, though a steady tourist industry also developed. Today, hundreds of Clevelanders come here on weekends to swim from the sandy public beach on the north shore, bird-watch with the island's active Audubon Society and hike through some dramatic abandoned quarries, which now sprout cedars

Kelleys Island

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