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 played at Dover-Bay prior to 1895. The golf course greens were located on the south side of Lake Road, east of Clague Road. The large frame clubhouse was on Lake Road northeast of Clague Road. In 1951, after the last of the Lawrence family had sold their Lake Road mansion, their lakeside property was split into lots for sale and the clubhouse was torn down. The Dover-Bay Country Club members built a new clubhouse on the south side of Lake Road. This meant changing all of the hole numbers so that they started and finished at the clubhouse. The nine-hole golf course operated through 1956, when the property was sold for development.
Category Archives: Landmark
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 manufacturing of electrical and carbon products. The property was later purchase by the Sheppard family and converted into the Bay View Osteopathic Hospital. The early 1980s brought the final transformation, when architect and developer Bob Corna created a 110-unit condominium conplex out of the closed hospital and surrounding area. It was named Cashelmara, meaning “stone house by the sea” in Gaelic.
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 swayed past telephone poles at 60 mph. The whistle shrieked as it sailed across the two longest trestles, the 544-foot Cahoon Creek trestle and the 432-foot Huntington trestle. The last railway car left Cleveland’s Public Square on May 15, 1938, ending the 45-year era of the electric interurban transit along Lake Erie’s southern shore.
Segments of the interurban track, now privately owned, run behind homes at the western end of Bay Village. Remnants of the two trestles can still be found in Cahoon Memorial Park and over Porter Creek Drive in the Huntington Reservation of Cleveland Metroparks.
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 now stands in Huntington Park on the BAYarts campus. The depot currently houses Chatty’s Pizzeria restaurant.
A Norfolk & Western wood-sided caboose is on permanent display behind the old train depot. The caboose was built during the summer of 1924.
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 spacious historic home was moved from its past location on the eastern end of Bay Village adjacent to the Cashelmara condominiums to its current location at on Lake Road in the Huntington Reservation of the Cleveland Metroparks via a two-mile barge ride on Lake Erie in the late summer of 1984.
The home itself – a Queen Anne Victorian structure — has an interesting history. In 1947, the Cleveland Osteopathic Association bought the land and buildings. The mansion was renamed the Bay Osteopathtic General Hospital and the Fuller House became the nurses’ residence.
In 1954, Dr. Richard Sheppard Sr., wife and his wife made the Fuller House their home. His infamous son, Sam Sheppard, was arrested by Bay Village police on the Fuller House porch for the murder of his wife, Marilyn. In 1955, the Sheppard family moved out of the home.
In 1981, then Baycrafters director Sally Price was instrumental in saving the house, which she wanted for galleries and studios. Baycrafters decided to move the house by floating it on the lake because the trip was shorter and cheaper.
Former Baycrafters board member Pat Heinke and her husband Lowell backed a bank loan that helped pay for the estimated $30,000 move to float the Fuller House to its present location. In comparison, the Cleveland Electric Illuminating Company wanted more than $100,000 to drop electric lines so the home could be towed 3 1/2 miles down Lake Road.
The Irene Lawrence Fuller House finally reopened on the campus of BAYarts in January 2011.
The renovated home features new flooring, windows, roofs, gutters, heating, venting and air conditioning, floor-to-ceiling window walls, a wrap-around deck, a second gazebo and an indoor and outdoor drawing and painting studio.
It also includes are a third floor office and first floor gallery space with moving art panels around decorative columns.
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 lighthouse, this tower was actually a water-pumping structure that served to irrigate the grounds of John Huntington’s 100-acre estate. A brick pump house was located below the tower, which is speculated to have been run on steam power. John Huntington built the water tower to house a large storage tank so he could pump water from Lake Erie and store it in the tank to provide water for his property.
He wanted it to look pleasing so he designed it to look like a lighthouse. It was never used as a lighthouse, but Mr. Huntington did install stairs that led to the top so he could watch the lake for his freighters hauling stone in and out of the Cleveland harbor.