Kelleys Island State Park East Quarry’s main entrance is about a mile East
of Division on Ward Road. Additional entrances for hikers can be found on Monagan and Woodford Roads. This quarry was part of a much larger quarry to the
west of Division. The Kelleys Island Lime and Transport Company began quarrying
this area around 1933 and continued until 1940. The quarry started at Division
Street and ended at the head of Horseshoe Lake. The quarried material was hauled
west under a bridge on Division Street via a narrow gauge railway. Some of the
tracks of the abandoned rail line can still be seen beneath the waters of the
lake.
Horseshoe Lake is a rapidly aging lake abundant with plant, fish and aquatic
life. Hikers and many wildlife species use the trails around the lake. The
several miles of trails afford hikers a spectacular view of Kelleys Island’s
trees, wildflowers, glacial markings and fossil preserves. The quarry at one
time was the bottom of the Devonian Sea. Scattered throughout is a marvelous
record of the marine, invertebrate animals, which abounded on the floor of the
sea. Here you can find fossil remains of corals, brachiopods, gastropods,
pelecypods, cephalopods, crinoids and stomato-poroids. Glacial scraping marks can also be seen on the
upper edges of the quarry and an abundant variety of birds have been spotted
from Horseshoe Lake.
Among the trees along the East Quarry trails, are: The American basswood, a
highly regarded timber tree that was used by Native Americans to make rope by
first soaking the bark in water to remove the non-fibrous portions; osage-orange
is the single species of its genus and was originally restricted to the southern
U.S.; black cherry, a beautifully colored wood used for fine furniture and
cabinets; hackberry, honey locust, chinquapin oak; and the eastern hop hornbeam
or "weed tree", which is distinguished from other trees by its bark
which has a shreddy appearance with broken shaggy plates that curve away from
the trunk.
The remnants of old fence lines in the East Quarry are typical on Kelleys
Island. Due to the shallow soil in most areas, islanders used barrels filled
with rocks to hold the fence posts. There are several areas on the island where
remains of these fence lines can be seen. Also visible near the trails in the
East Quarry are fences made of rocks gathered by the farmers when they cleared
the fields for planting in the late 19th and early 20th
Centuries.