Those Places Thursday: There Was Once a Margaretta School in Bay Bridge

From 1917 into the 1920s, there was a Margaretta Township  primary school in the small unincorporated area of Erie County known as Bay Bridge. This small community was the location of the Medusa Cement Company. Many of the employees were  immigrants from Europe. In the 1920 U.S. Census, the heads of household of over sixty families in Margaretta Township stated that they had been born in Hungary. This news article below, which appeared in the February 8, 1917 Sandusky Star Journal,  listed the names of youngsters in the Bay Bridge school who were on the Honor Roll, including the names of  my great uncles Frank and Andrew Orshoski.

In this article, from the Sandusky Register from April 2, 1922, Frank and Andrew Orshoski had perfect attendance.

So far, I have not found any pictures of the old school. By the 1930s, the children of Bay Bridge attended the Margaretta elementary school in Venice, Ohio. The map below shows the location of the Bay Bridge school from the 1920s.

Andrew and Frank Orshoski are among the young men who are standing around the casket of their mother, Julia Herzog Orshoski, who died in 1919, leaving Great Grandpa Joe Orshoski a widower with six young sons.

The old Margaretta school in Bay Bridge filled a need for the growing population of that small community. In the early 1960s the Medusa Cement plant closed, but the descendants of many former Medusa employees still live in the area.