Kelleys Island History Blog

A FIRST HAND ACCOUNT OF HALLOWEEN TRADITIONS – 1868  ON KELLEYS ISLAND By Leslie Korenko, author of Kelleys Island 1866-1871 The Lodge, Suffrage & Baseball   There were many traditions celebrated on Halloween. Most were of Celtic, Scottish or English origins and reflected the heritage of Kelleys Island residents. Hallowe’en was traditionally a time for marriage divination. One custom was for country girls to be blindfolded and then led into a field where they were supposed to pull the first cabbage they could find. If the cabbage head had a lot of dirt attached to the roots, their future husband would be wealthy while a cabbage with a close white head meant an old husband. Eating the cabbage would reveal his nature - bitter or sweet! The ladies brought the cabbages home and hung them above the door; perhaps to attract that perfect mate. Apples played a role too. The theory was that if an apple was peeled in one long continuous strip, and the peeling thrown backwards ove...

  THIS ISLAND’S STONE FENCES By Leslie Korenko author of Kelleys Island - The Courageous, Poignant, and Often Quirky Lives of Island Pioneers. So what is the story about these walls which snake across the Island, looking like historic beasts? THE RUMORS Recently we had three queries about our stone fences. The first was a belief that they had been built by the WPA.   President Franklin D. Roosevelt created the WPA with an executive order on May 6, 1935. It was part of his New Deal plan to lift the country out of the Great Depression by reforming the financial system and restoring the economy to pre-Depression levels. In 1939 it was renamed the Work Projects Administration which employed mostly unskilled men to carry out public works infrastructure projects. They built more than 4,000 new school buildings, erected 130 new hospitals, laid roughly 9,000 miles of storm drains and sanitary sewer l...