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Fort Sandusky was a British trading and military outpost established around 1744. The Native Americans who inhabited the immediate surrounding area were the Seneca, displaced from New York by warfare at the outset of the American Revolution. The generally accepted theory is that the name "Sandusky" is an Anglicization of the phrase San Too Chee, meaning "cold water." A less accepted theory is that the city was named after a Polish fur trader by the name of Antoni Sadowski or Jacob Sodowsky. The name "I.Sandoski" appears on a 1733 map, while Sandusky Bay is identified as Lac (Lake) Sandouské on a 1718 map by Guillaume Delisle. The surname originally was spelled Sądowski in Polish which is pronounced "Sung-doff-ski", but in English the letter "W", contrary to Polish, is not pronounced as the letter "V". The assimilated English version was "Sandoski". The Greater Sandusky area was a safe haven and a new start for refugees of the Firelands, from the battlefields of the Revolutionary War in Connecticut. Norwalk, the Huron County seat (just south of Erie County), is named for Norwalk, Connecticut. Similarly, New London is named after the Connecticut town. Established as Portland in 1816, the name was changed two years later to Sandusky. Norwalk was also established in 1816; at the time, both were growing towns of a unified Huron County. Not long after, thanks to the growth of both towns, Erie County, Ohio's second smallest (in land area), came into being. The county encompassed newly rechristened Sandusky's far west side, Vermilion to the east, and Norwalk's northern line to the south. Prior to the abolition of slavery in the United States, Sandusky was a major stop on the Underground Railroad. As depicted in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, many slaves seeking to reach freedom in Canada made their way to Sandusky, where they boarded boats crossing Lake Erie to the port of Amherstburg in Ontario. Downtown Sandusky was designed according to a modified grid plan, known as the Kilbourne Plat after its designer. The original street pattern featured a grid overlaid with streets resembling the symbols of Freemasonry. Hector Kilbourne was a surveyor who laid out this grid in downtown Sandusky. He was the first Worshipful Master of the Sandusky Masonic Lodge. Sandusky was the site of groundbreaking for the Mad River and Lake Erie Railroad on September 17, 1835. Currently, Battery Park Marina is located on original site of the MR&LE Railroad. The tracks that ran through downtown Sandusky have since been removed. Most of the downtown industrial area is being re-used for other purposes, including mainly marina dockage. The coal docks located west of downtown still use a portion of the original MR&LE lines. The city was a center of paper-making. The Hinde & Dauch Paper Company was the largest employer in the city in the early 1900s. This article is from WikiPedia
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