8 SANDUSKY FLORA. 



In many places in Sandusky this polished limestone 

 requires no quarrying to serve admirably for basement 

 floors. So level is the rock and the overlying drift that 

 for miles around the city, the eye can scarcely detect 

 any elevatioas or any depressions with the exception of 

 slight ones made by small streams. 



Many of the rare plants of Erie County grow in 

 sand, especially in the sand deposits east of the village 

 of Milan and along the sand ridges that stretch east 

 and west in Margaretta township and along the 

 border of the prairie in the southern part of Perkins 

 township. These were formerly lake beaches and just 

 below the sand ridge that extends south-west from 

 Castalia is a ledge of limestone which shows very 

 plainly the action of the waves, though it is now four 

 miles from the water. When the lake had settled to a 

 lower level, it must have beat against the foot of this 

 ledge, undermining the rock and causing it to break 

 away in large masses, as it is doing now at the west 

 end of Rattlesnake Island and elsewhere. These 

 detached masses often settled but a few feet, leaving 

 deep but narrow chasms between them and the parent 

 cliff, and these chasms are but partially filled even to 

 the present day with dirt washed in from above. In 

 places, trees grow out of them and the walls are 

 bedecked with ferns. The rich woods covering the side 

 of this hill, which I have called Margaretta Ridge, the 

 sandy fields at the top and the prairie below afford a 

 variety of plants found nowhere else in the county and 

 a large number of species unknown in the counties 

 farther east. 



The Huron River divides Erie county into an 

 eastern and western part. Few of the plants which 

 grow in Erie county and not in Lorain or Cuyahoga 

 counties are found east of this river. West of it are no 

 natural surface streams that continue to flow all 

 summer and except near the river no ravines. The 



