My attention was called to Johnson's Island, which was used for the confinement of Confederate officers during the late war. I learned that they were allowed the luxury of an occasional bath in the lake, under guard, of course, and in squads of a hundred men—a luxury which the boys in Libby and Charleston and Columbia would have thought "too good to be true."
Under the city are the limestone quarries, which furnish an inexhaustible supply of building-material and which give an added distinction to this bright little city of the lakes.
On the evening of my arrival I spoke in Union Hall and was introduced by Captain Culver, who referred to my military record and the object of my lectures. Captain Culver is a comrade in the G. A. R. and was a fellow-prisoner at Libby and other prisons. He did much towards making my stay at Sandusky most agreeable.
Sixty-fourth Day.
Fountain House,
Castalia, Ohio,
July Fourteenth.
My Sandusky friend, Captain Culver, called at the West House for me soon after breakfast, and we spent the forenoon strolling about the city. I was shown the newly completed Court House, of which Sanduskians are very proud; met several of the officials and found much to admire. Left at five o'clock in the afternoon and by six had reached Castalia, five miles distant, which I soon found had something to boast of back of its classic name. As a stranger I was of course immediately told of the wonders of the "waters," which I learned form quite an attraction in summer and keep the little place in a flutter of excitement.
Marshall Burton came in 1836 and laid out this prairie town at the head of Coal Creek. Finding the source of the stream in a cool, clear spring, now known to be two hundred feet in diameter and sixty feet deep, named the place "Castalia," from the famed Greek fountain at the foot of Parnassus. The waters of this spring are so pure that objects are plainly seen through the sixty liquid feet, and they say that when the sun reaches meridian, these objects reflect the colors of the rainbow, which might suggest to Castalians that the ancient sun-god, Apollo, favored the western namesake of his Delphian fount. I met no poets here, but possibly inspiration is not one of the powers guaranteed. Indeed if it should treat devotees of the Divine Art, as it does everything else that is plunged into it, we should have petrified poets.
These petrifying qualities of the water, caused by the combined action of lime, soda, magnesia and iron have made the mill-wheels which turn in Coal Creek incapable of decay.