228 Outo StaTE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
CEDAR STUMPS. 
In determining the age of most of the older ridges I have 
depended on data furnished by cedar stumps. Several points 
must be considered. Ist. The ridge was formed probably 
nearly or quite 40 years before cedars started to grow on it. 
Ridges 8 and 7 have no cedars. Following ridge 6 a certain dis- 
tance, Fred Lay counted 13 cedars, all quite small, and returning 
to the starting point along Ridge 5, he counted 160. On the 
bar, which has cottonwoods over 40 years old, are no cedars 
although it is nearly 5 miles long. On the Marblehead Spit 
which has formed northeast of Johnson’s Island since 1858 the 
only cedar is one that is said to have been planted. 2d. The 
large cedars on Cedar Point were cut more than half a century 
ago. Mr. Samuel Catherman who came to Sandusky in 1835 says 
“right along after that cedars were cut on the Point; there was 
quite a business of cutting and transporting them to Sandusky, 
where all the fence posts were cedar and the frames of quite a 
number of houses, some of them still standing. The wood was 
used also for other things. Most of the largest ones had been 
cut by 1850 or about that time.’”’ Mr. Louis Adolph, who came 
in 1863, says, “they had been cut long before that.’’ Captain 
Freyensee remembers that in 1849 or 1850 in a warm day in 
January he helped load a scow with cedar posts about half way 
between the present dock of the Cedar Point Company and the 
U.S. Government dock. The yawl used to carry the posts out 
to the scow was loaded so high that it turned over spilling the 
posts with him into the bay. He does not remember seeing cedar 
timber brought from Cedar Point after that. According to John 
Homegardner, Sr., and others the last of the large cedars were 
removed from Cedar Point by D. C. Richmond who used them 
for posts on his farm where they have remained sound to this 
day. This was in February, 1850. One of the men employed 
in the work was drowned. Mr. Homegardner too says, “‘they 
began taking them from the Point as early as 1835.” Dan 
Myers came in 1852. He says “some cedars were cut in 1853 
or ’54. Probably these were not among the largest. 3rd. 
After counting the rings on a stump a number equal to five- 
eighths of the number of rings in the outer inch is added on 
account of the sap wood that has rotted away. 4th. The 
largest stumps are hollow and in estimating their age it is 
not right to assume that the number of rings to the inch in 
the missing portion was about the same as in the portion remain- 
ing. As a general rule the number to the inch increases toward 
the outside, though this is not very noticeable in small stumps; 
