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Gibraltar Island sits in Put-in-Bay Harbor and is the tallest land elevation in the Put-In-Bay area. Today the island is managed by The Ohio State University. One of the early owners of Gibraltar was a Civil War financier named Jay Cooke. Cooke's daughter later sold the island to Franz Theodore Stone, and it was eventually donated to the Ohio State University. The three story building on the western edge of Gibraltar is Stone Laboratory, used primarily for research by university graduate students.
Stone Laboratory was established in 1895 and today is the oldest freshwater biological field station in the United States. Today besides being used as a field station, it is also the base for researchers from 12 different agencies and universities.
In 1861 Jay Cooke erected a corner stone where it was thought that Commodore Perry positioned a lookout to watch for the approach of British naval ships from Fort Detroit.
Jay Cooke was born in Sandusky, Ohio in 1821 and though his various enterprises led him across the country, he almost always spent his summers on Gibraltar Island with his family until his death in 1905. At that time possession of the island was passed to his daughter Laura Barney and in 1925 she sold the island to Julius Stone, a Ohio State University Board of Trustee member. Julius then donated the property to the university with the provision the university would develop a research and teaching facility on the island.
Photo by S. Sterrett
The stone manion was completed in 1865 after Jay Cooke purchased the island for $3001 in 1864. Over the next year Jay's brother Pitt supervised construction of the 15-room summer home that became known to locals as Cooke Castle. The Cooke summer vacation home is a high Victorian Italianate stye architecture with a Gothic tower on the east end of the house. Over the years while Jay Cooke and his family owned the property, a long list of dignitaries included William T. Serman, William Howard Taft, Ruther B. Hayes, and Salmon Chase.
Photo by S. Sterrett
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