Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Castalia, OH

Castalia is a village in Margaretta Township, Erie County, Ohio, and is part of the Sandusky metropolitan area.

By 1738 a Wyandot settlement stood at what is now Castalia under the leadership of Nicholas Orontony; the Wyandot burned their village in 1748 and relocated to the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, in what is today Cleveland.

The village was laid out in 1836 and named after Castalia, a figure in Greek mythology.

An earlier settlement at the site was called Cold Creek, where in 1820 Docartus Snow of Vermont built the first grist mill in the Firelands area; the area's first schoolhouse, a log building, had gone up in 1818.

Castalia's springs were famous long before the village existed — Major Robert Rogers and his Rangers stopped at Cold Creek after the fall of Quebec, and Rogers recorded a remarkable spring that 'boils out of the ground in a column three feet high.'

The Blue Hole, a deep, intensely blue spring-fed pond near Castalia, was one of Ohio's best-known roadside attractions in its heyday, drawing some 165,000 visitors a summer when State Route 269 was the main route to Cedar Point.

Cold Creek, which flows through Castalia, is known as the river that never freezes, because it is fed by springs whose water holds a constant cold temperature year-round.

Those cold springs made the Castalia area a trout-fishing center — the state runs a fish hatchery in Margaretta Township — and as early as 1870 mill owner John Hoyt stocked a thousand trout eggs in Cold Creek to test whether the water could support trout.

Just north of the village, the Resthaven Wildlife Area protects more than 2,000 acres of wetlands, with some 400 acres of water and 13 ponds.

Castalia's population peaked at 1,045 in 1970 and has eased down since; the 2020 census counted 774 people, and the village had 352 households at the 2010 census.