LAKE INTEREST - Lake Erie

I must admit that I never really thought about having an interest in Lakes. Since I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, I immediately thought of Lake Erie. When I was growing up, my god-parents used to take me and my little brother on Lake Erie to fish. My god-father hand made our fishing rods, which I always thought was really cool! I think I did catch a few small fish, but it was always alot of fun! My godmother cleaned and cooked the fish that we caught....right now, though, I can't remember what kind of fish we actually caught. In the summers, we used to go swimming in Lake Erie, and there were always many festivals to attend during the summer. My favorite was the July BBQ Rib cook-off! My Uncle Sammy always made the best ribs, and he placed in the top 5 almost every year! :) Of course, at the time I never thought a minute about how Lake Erie was created. So, I thought I'd take the opportunity to read up on my home town lake, and share the most interesting points (at least to me) with you!

1.) LAKE ERIE'S DEMOGRAPHICS:
 In total area, Lake Erie is the 12th largest freshwater lake in the world and the most shallow of the 5 Great Lakes. It is about 210 miles long, 57 miles wide, with a shoreline of approximately 71 miles with a maximum depth of 210'. Because of its shallow depth, the lake warms up sooner in the spring, making it an ideal fishing spot. Lake Erie also freezes sooner in the winter, creating a large moderating climate phenomenon that keeps temperatures, while still cold, just not bitter cold. That little detail makes the area an ideal grape growing region. Ohio's coast is 312 miles,


2.) HOW LAKE ERIE WAS FORMED
Over the ages, numerous ice age glaciers helped carve out the Lake Erie basin. Today you can still massive bedrock that was notched by the weight of tons of ice sliding over it on its way into southern Ohio. When the ice melted, large areas of softer limestone and salt beds had collapsed under the weight of the glaciers that left a shallow depression. As the climate warmed, the glaciers melted forming streams and rivers that flowed into that massive depression as they still do today. For the most part Ohio's rivers flow south except for a line that runs roughly through where the glaciers were the heaviest. From that area the rivers flow north, into the lake. It is these rivers that help maintain the water levels of the lake and provide the spawning grounds for many of the lake's abundant fish. In fact, the southwest section of the lake between the Sandusky and Maumee Rivers has become known as the walleye capital of the world.

3.) CEDAR POINT - MY CHILD HOOD AMUSEMENT PARK
The beaches of a little jut of land just south of Kelley's Island known as Cedar Point also became a popular tourist spot for its pristine beaches. So many tourists were arriving each summer that a proprietor decided to add a few rides for the kids and the amusement park industry had arrived on the shores of Lake Erie, never looking back. We went to Cedar Point every year when I was growing up!!! :) It was such a fun amusement park!!!


4.) HOW LAKE ERIE GOT ITS NAME
When French explorers and traders entered the Great Lakes region in the 1600s, American Indian nations already had given names to the immense bodies of water they lived along. As reports and crude maps filtered back to Europe, these Indian names frequently were combined with names the French thought more appropriate.
Samuel de Champlain drew one of the earliest, still-surviving maps in 1632. Champlain named Lake Erie for an Indian tribe living along its shore. The “Neutrals” were a tribe on Erie’s north shore which had not taken a side in a conflict between the Iroquois and the Hurons. Thus Erie became “La Nation neutre.”
Later, Nicholas Sanson, France’s royal geographer renamed the lake Lac Erie, ou Du Chat after the Erie Indian nation. These were a fierce people famed for wearing the skins of cats, a nation known to the Iroquois League as the “Erielhonan,” or the “long-tails.” To the French, this nation was called the Erie, or “cat people.

This large limestone rock is on the south shore of Kelleys Island just east of downtown. The remains of at least two Native American villages were found very near the rock. Archaeological and historical research suggests that until about 1643 AD, Algonquian-speaking groups affiliated with the "Fire Nation" confederacy populated the Sandusky region. Historical references describe a water route of travel via Lake Ontario to the western basin of Lake Erie, an area rich in beaver pelts. It is assumed it was these pre-historic groups or members of roving bands of Iroquoian peoples (Neutral, Erie, Cat) after 1643 that carved the rock’s markings.

All information in this post is from the following website:
http://www.touring-ohio.com/lake-erie.html
TOURING OHIO - LAKE ERIE

Photographs retrieved from GOOGLE IMAGES