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30 HISTORY OF ERIE COUNTY
to great depths it has the quality of becoming viscid and travels sloAvly
doAvn hill or from the center of the greatest thickness, with the awful
power of the •mills of the gods which grind very SIOAVIV but grind
exceeding fine.'
"The continent-Avide mass of ice slid from poleAvard and dug out the
basin in Avhich Lake Erie, and all our lakes are IIOAV held. A IOAV mountain
that once ranged from Canada through the islands of Lake Erie
soutliAvards quite to Cincinnati, Ohio, was literally uncapped by several
hundred feet and so leveled that only remnants of its existence SIIOAV
Avhere it stood, namely, Marblehead, Kelley's Island, the three Bass
Islands, Point an Pellee and minor islands, SIIOAV where once it stood,
and scarcely a foot of rock over the whole region but SIIOAVS the irresistible
force it used when the boulders of the Canadian granite and sand
in the bottom of the glacier were held to the surface of the underlying
rocks as it floAved from the northeast. Its power can faintly be estimated
when it is said that it plucked an acre section of rock and a hundred
feet deep, pushing it ahead of it. There is a groove near Lakeside
forty feet across and tAventy feet deep which was literally cut through the
hard massive corniferous limestone by its thousands of years of grinding
action in passing over Marblehead. An acre belonging to the Archaelogical
Society of Ohio has been preserved on Kelley's Island to "show, as it
superbly does, the poAA'erful work a glacier can accomplish. The Devil's
Bath Tub on Marblehead SIIOAVS how the viscidity of ice under great
pressure can fit itself to all the least inequalities of surface, in this case
having a AA'hirling, turning over action as if a giant auger guided the
ice of the glacier, the ice in this case never once shoAving a fracture but
moulded itself to the rock as molten iron would. A large 20-ton
granite boulder but a short distance away—one of the tools the glacier
used to excavate Lake Erie—coming from the east Avas thrust against
a shoulder of the limestone near Myron demons' place, and was made,
and is called 'The Prisoner,' and the glacier being not able to remove it,
went right on over it, the grooves cut in it being parallel to those on the
lime rock west of it. The grinder in this case had to take some of his
OAA'n medicine, and was ground himself. The ice AA'as thick enough to fill
the Connecticut Valley, cover Mount Washington, and all minor mountains
of the Appalachian chain, the Adirondacks; it cut the gorge of the
Hudson River, hundreds of feet below its present water surface; cut
deep Mlie Champlain and George lakes, and changed the whole aspect of
the region which it had before it came.
"The most celebrated boulder (pictured in many books, archaelogical
and state histories) is 'Picture Rock' on the south shore of Kelley's
Island. It is about 10 feet by 15, of limestone, glaciated on the upper
side, engraved with scenes perpetuating episodes in their history by the
Indians before the advent of the white man. A similar one lies on the
southeast coast of Johnson's Island, but not engraved.
'' This ice accumulation shut off the exit of Lake Erie from the east,
and caused Lake Michigan to AOAV southward over the site of the Hennepin
Canal into the Mississippi, via the Illinois; Lake Erie to the Ohio.