Category Archives: News

Bay Village Historical Society receives OHRAB Achievement Award

The Bay Village Historical Society has recently been named as a recipient of the 2023 Ohio Historical Records Advisory Board) Achievement Award.

The Ohio Historical Advisory Board (OHRAB) is the central body for historical records planning in the state. The board is funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. Board members represent Ohio’s pubic and private archives, records offices and research institutions.

In 2019, the Bay Village Historical Society began a project to conserve and increase access to the portraits and photographs in Rose Hill Museum. These portraits are vital to the Bay Village Historical Society. According to the will donating the land and home to the historical society, the portraits of the descendants of the Cahoon family, the first settlers of Bay Village, and the portraits of other early settler families must be displayed.

In the first phase of the project, historical society staff and volunteers removed the portraits from their original frames and transported them to the Cleveland Public Library’s main branch where they were scanned as high-resolution tiffs. The Cleveland Institute of Art then produced an archival copy of each portrait.

A local artist volunteered with the historical society to restore the frames, touching up the paint and using modeling clay to repair the cracks. The archival copies were placed in the repaired frames and hung on the walls of the Rose Hill Museum.

The historical society also consulted with staff from ICA-Art Conservation, Jamison Art Conservation and Cleveland State University to develop a plan to conserve the original portraits. This included some portraits consisting of chalk drawings on paper with silk backing. Custom-made archival boxes with archival foam core and all-cotton batting were built to house the original portraits to preserve them for future generations.

During the project, the Bay Village Historical Society created an index to the portrait gallery, including biographical information about the individuals. A copy of the index is available for visitors to Rose Hill Museum. The information, along with digital copies of the portraits, is available online at www.bayhistorical.com/portrait-gallery.

BVHS wins “Project of the Year” 2022

The Community Council of Bay Village has awarded its 2022 “Project of the Year Award” to the Bay Village Historical Society for its revitalization project.

The pandemic has had an effect on all of our lives. Individuals, businesses and organizations have had to adjust. COVID had a major influence on the Bay Village Historical Society, what we were able to accomplish, and how we reached the public.

Fortunately, thanks to our volunteers in the community, we managed to turn a negative situation into an enriching and rewarding experience. In 2020 we began the daunting project of doing a complete inventory of Rose Hill.

This led to the discovery of buried treasures and reorganization of the museum. As a result, the Bay Village Historical Society’s revitalization project, “Shining a New Light on the Past,” is the recipient of this year’s Bay Village Project of the Year award, given by the Community Council.

When Rose Hill Museum was mandated to close, historical society volunteers got to work, logging in more than 110 hours every week during 2021. Individuals stepped in where they felt comfortable. Some zeroed in on one aspect, others worked on a regular basis.

A variety of projects were able to be completed at home. When on-site, generally only two people worked at a time, social distancing and masked. The inventory for the historical society continued so that by the end of 2021 volunteers had entered over 7,000 items into the archival database that were all appropriately stored.

This included over 11,000 images of those items. All items were entered into the PastPerfect program which is recognized as a significant cataloguing system by museums. Items were numbered, described, photographed or scanned, measured, condition described and more.

The “Early Family Papers Project” which contains some of the society’s earliest papers, continued and over 1,000 documents were entered into the PastPerfect. Posters depicting the lineage of the Cahoon, Osborn, Saddler, Aldrich and Wischmeyer families were installed. Objects once owned by the families accompany the display.

Pedestal signs were installed in Rose Hill with background information of various displays and a QR code directing visitors to our website with more historical information.

The life-size cutouts of the Cahoon sisters that were fading with age after 20 years were copied onto plywood and painted in color.

The Cahoon Cabin in the creek valley reopened to the public after being cleaned, inventoried and reorganized.

The historical society’s latest endeavor is a twice-monthly blog post highlighting an artifact from the collection. “Glimpse of the Past” can be viewed at www.bayhistorical.com/blog-entries.

Visit Rose Hill Museum when it reopens in April, on Sundays from 2 p.m. to 4 p.m., to see a slice of Bay Village history in person. Tours are also available by appointment. Phone (216) 319-4634.