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A library has existed to serve Sandusky’s citizens since 1826. Beginning with the Portland Library and growing through the years, Sandusky’s library found its ultimate caretakers in a group of local women who started a fund to build a new library. Built with the aid of a $50,000 grant from Andrew Carnegie, Sandusky’s Carnegie Library was dedicated on July 3, 1901. Designed by New York architects D’Oench and Yost in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, the library was built of locally quarried limestone. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. In 2004 a renovated library was dedicated, which incorporated the former Erie County Jail building and almost tripled the facility’s size.
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Holy Angels Catholic Church is the mother church of Sandusky. Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, a French Missionary, began ministering to Catholics in the Sandusky area in late 1839. Soon after, William H. Mills offered five lots, $530, and the materials needed to build a church. Father Machebeuf laid the cornerstone on October 13, 1841, and services were held in 1842. By Christmas of 1845, the building was complete, the steeple added, and the bell installed. The congregation was mostly Irish emigrants. In 1855, as more Germans settled nearby, they built St. Mary’s Mother of Sorrows Church. The city’s expansion prompted the building of Sts. Peter and Paul Church in 1871. Holy Angels became a mission church of Sts. Peter and Paul until 1875 when Holy Angels was assigned its own pastor and reopened.
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A network of Native American trails, usually following waterways, traversed Ohio and often determined the routes of military roads and improved highways. U.S. Route 33 follows the route of the Scioto Trail from the confluence of the Scioto and Olentangy rivers to State Route 161, where U.S. Route 33 becomes State Route 257. The Scioto Trail extended from the mouth of the Scioto River at Portsmouth (also known as Shawnee Town) to Sandusky Bay and connected the Shawnee’s hunting grounds in Kentucky with Lake Erie. The trail ran along the Scioto River, the Little Scioto River, and the Sandusky River with a portage between the Little Scioto and Sandusky rivers in Crawford County. The Scioto Trail, used for warfare, trade, and migration, was one of the most important trails in the Old Northwest.
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In 1886, thirty-six members from Toledo’s downtown Lutheran church, St. Paul’s, met to form a German-speaking Lutheran congregation for immigrants from Pommern, Mecklenburg and Hanover. Initially worshipping at St. Stephen’s at the corner of Harrison and Oliver Street, the congregation built a frame church on this site in 1887. That same year St. Lucas pioneered an early form of health insurance, The Mutual Sick Benefit Society, that later became a larger fraternal organization called The Mutual Sick Benefit Society for Ohio and Other States. In 1999, after joining a program called Reconciling in Christ, St. Lucas became the first Lutheran congregation in northern Ohio to publicaly welcome the LGBT communities. Named after Saint Luke, the patron saint of physicians, the church’s history is one of healing.
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In 1916, Bishop of Toledo Joseph Schrembs requested that the Sisters of Saint Francis, Rochester, Minnesota, send nuns to work with Polish immigrant children that were flooding into greater Toledo. Mother Mary Adelaide Sandusky (1874-1964) brought 22 sisters who quickly established a new order, their Toledo motherhouse, and began teaching in parish schools. Under her steady guidance, the Sisters of St. Francis of the Congregation of Our Lady of Lourdes, Sylvania, Ohio, transformed 89-acres of farmland into a tranquil campus that included gardens, shrines, and an arboretum. Mother Adelaide designed buildings modeled on the California missions and filled them with European art as well as original ceramic murals made by the Sisters. The Sylvania Franciscans flourished and over 500 new members joined between 1916 and 1964. (Continued on other side)