Kelleys Island History Blog

The first mention of Valentine's Day appeared in The Islander in 1861 – “St. Valentines Day passed off very briskly. We learn that 50 Valentines passed through the Post Office on that day. We went down after one but were doomed to disappointment and were very much surprised to hear that we wrote this Valentine and we wrote that. We must have had our hands full to have written 40 or 50 Valentines besides attending our Editorial duties. We can assure our readers that Editors have enough to account for besides manufacturing Valentines.” F. Kelley and E. Huntington were the editors of this issue of the Islander. The Post Office, established in 1854, was located in the Store on the Corner, also known as The Lodge (the building on the left) On the right was the Kelley family home and hotel called the Island House and in the middle is Kelley's Hall.   THE HISTORY OF VALENTINES The island Store was always willing to provide the community with the latest items and when valentines...

We’ve all seen them, the yearbooks from the 1970s when Kurt Boker had a hand in preparing them. They were hardbound and full of photos from the school and its students, but they also contained loads of historic pictures, stories and information. One of the projects that Leslie undertook this winter was scanning all these old yearbooks and posting them to the KIHA website . These yearbooks contained quite a few surprises. The earliest complete yearbook we found in our files was from 1954 and came from Iola Riedy’s house. Iola Riedy lived in the stone building on Division St. that used to be the stone school house . After the death of her husband, Gilbert, Iola, who was a professional librarian, installed a branch of the Sandusky library in a small room she added to the SW side of her house. The library served islanders and summer visitors until 1985 when she retired. Islanders recall putting their returned books on the washing machine inside the back door. The library then moved int...