Early Papers
The Bay Village Historical Society was awarded a grant from the Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board in 2020 to support the effort of placing 600 Early Family Papers on our website. The families primarily represented are the Cahoon and Aldrich families, who were early settlers, but includes documents from the Foote, Saddler, Tuttle and Wischmeyer families among others.
The collection includes a wide variety of topics and records, including photographs. Not all items are included on the website, but are available for research.
BHS Yearbooks
Bay High School yearbooks through the ages.
Click to download a PDF of the complete yearbook. 1927 through 2016. (1935 and 1936 are missing.)

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Bay’s Oldest Homes
Reuben Osborn house
Cahoon Memorial Park – 1815. The Osborns came from England in 1641 and are one of the oldest families in the United States. Reuben Osborn was born in Connecticut and lived in New York with...

Rose Hill Museum
Cahoon Memorial Park – 1818. Joseph Cahoon, wife Lydia and family came to Bay Village, the place that he called, “the most beautiful spot in all of America” in October, 1810. He and his...

Aaron Aldrich House
30663 Lake Road – 1829. Aaron Aldrich and his wife Betsy, both of English families, moved to Dover from Rhode Island in 1816. Their home still stands today, occupied, with the outside,...

Selden Osborn House
29059 Lake Road – 1832. This is the second-oldest inhabited home in the city. The Osborn home was the birthplace of three generations. Nancy and Selden lived here all their lives. The house ...

Dexter Tuttle House
25547 Lake Road – 1845. Dexter Tuttle came from Massachusetts in 1823 when he was 16 years old. His family drove an ox cart, waded across the Cuyahoga and Rocky Rivers, and settled in...

Thomas Powell House
576 Bradley Road – 1852. Thomas Powell, of English descent, came from New York in 1830. He met and married Sophia, the daughter of William and Elizabeth Saddler, in 1832 when he was 29 and...

Sherman Osborn House
29560 Lake Road – 1853. Reuben Osborn bought his land from the Connecticut Land Company for one dollar an acre. Reuben gave his grandchildren Sherman, Reuben, Samuel, David and Betsey each...

The David Foote Barn House
30912 Lake Road – 1855. David Foote was born in Colchester, Conn., in 1760 and married Betsy Hamlin
of the same town. He served in the Revolutionary War. They had 10 children.
In 1815,...

Henry Hagedorn House
603 Bassett Road – 1858. Sometime in 1852, Henry and Katherine Hagedorn and their five children left Hanover, Germany, and made the long and difficult journey to America. After several...

Historic Landmarks in Bay
Water Tower at Huntington
The Huntington water tower, a well-known landmark, was used to store water pumped from Lake Erie below to irrigate John Huntington’s orchards and vineyards.
Though it looks like a...

Fuller House at BAYarts
The Irene Lawrence Fuller House was part of the complex of homes built by industrialist Washington Lawrence in the 1870s. Lawrence had seven daughters and built a house for each.
The...

Train Station and Caboose at BAYarts
The Nickel Plate Dover railway station was located on Dover Center Road in Bay Village next to the railroad tracks. In 1963, the closed station was donated to the city of Bay Village. It...

Trestles at Huntington
The Lake Shore Electric Railway connected the city of Cleveland from its station at 25 Public Square to its western suburbs and beyond. Skimming through Bay Village, the interurban cars...

Cashelmara / Lawrence Estate
The Cashelmara condominiums, located on the shores of Lake Erie in eastern Bay Village, boast a rich history beginning in 1898 with a mansion built by Washington Lawrence, a pioneer in the...

Dover Bay CC Golf Course
Bay Village resident Washington Lawrence indulged his family's and friend's wishes and developed the oldest golf course in Cuyahoga County. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, golf was ...

Rememberances by Kay Laughlin
Bay Village: A Way of Life
In 1971, my sister, Gay Menning, and I along with the Bay Village Historical Society, co-wrote the first written history of Bay Village, Ohio. “Bay Village: A Way...

The Cahoon family
On the morning of October 10, 1810, the Joseph and Lydia Cahoon family wagon stopped at the mouth of a creek on the southern shore of Lake Erie in Ohio country. The ...

Capoba Lodge
The house at 459 Cahoon Road, on the northeast corner of Wolf and Cahoon roads, was built as a result of a friendship between two sets of sisters.
The Cahoon...

The Washington Lawrence mansion
Washington Lawrence, who was born in Olmsted Township in 1840, attended Baldwin University in Berea, Ohio. He was an associate of Charles F. Brush, the inventor of...

Clang, clang, clang went the trolley
To some it was exciting, to some, necessary, and to others, convenient.
On October 6, 1897, the first maroon deck car, a 40-foot Brill with 22.5 tons weight and a...

German farms and the Wischmeyers
Warm sunny days and cool nights brought a migration of German people to North Dover Township in the 1850s. They purchased acreage from the Foote, Winsor, Aldrich,...

Here today, gone forever
George Serb stated in one of his Bay Village Revisited newspaper memoirs: “All good things must come to an end, an old saying. The CVS Pharmacy plans have been...

Cahoon Memorial Park
“This is the most beautiful place on earth,” declared Margaret Cahoon taking in the beauty of her farm nestled on the south shore of Lake Erie. And so it was.
In...

The Water Tower at Huntington
Huntington Reservation, on the shores of Lake Erie, was the former country estate of John Huntington (1832-1893), a prominent Cleveland industrialist and...

Bay Village Landmark Houses
The first priority of the newly formed Bay Village Historical Society, in 1960, was to plaque as Landmark Houses those houses documented as being 100 years old....

The History of Martin’s Deli
On the north end of Bassett Road is Lake Road and the old Sadler (Saddler) property (Lot #92). Sometime after the Lake Shore Electric Interurban track was laid...

National Register of Historic Places
Bay Village has five structures listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Although changes have been made to some of these structures over the years,...

Bay Village’s Back-yard Playground
Location, location, location. The following two stories began with a lake at the back door.
Golf!!! It all began with Washington Lawrence, president of the...

The Peterson Family Buildings
As you sit at the traffic light on West Oviatt and Dover Center Roads in Bay Village, facing east, your eyes see a two-story brick building with a sign that reads...

The Dover Station
New and exciting sounds were heard in North Dover in 1882 with the beat of the steam locomotive exhaust, the shrill call of a whistle and the rumble of iron wheels...

Growing Up on the Foote Farm
In 1936, our father purchased a lot in the Foote apple orchard on the south side of Lake Road across from the Foote farmhouse and later, when the trolley stopped...

Methodist Church Marker
Bay United Methodist Church dedicates historical marker
by Kay Laughlin on 9/18/18
Although rain sprinkles fell, it didn’t dampen the joy and spirit of the day for ...
