Since the late 1800s, the Mansfield Foundry has occupied 500 N. Main St. in Mansfield with a silent strength. Through a number of ownerships and countless employees, the building remained a constant. Now, after decades of use, the foundry is finally coming down.
“When you have a major change, change is always hard,” said Mansfield Mayor Tim Theaker. “Change is even harder when you are associated with it, and when you start to destroy it and it’s permanently removed, that is something that’s even more difficult to digest.”
According to information provided in a grant application for Brownfield Funds, the first known use of the foundry’s property was in 1887 when the city of Mansfield developed a municipal potable water pump station. The first industrial use of the property came when Ohio Brass acquired the property in 1919. Ohio Brass owned and operated the foundry through 1984 when it was acquired by Mansfield Ferrous Casting, Inc. until 1989.
The Mansfield Foundry Corporation owned and operated the facility from 1989 through 1994, before being purchased by the MFC Acquisition Corporation in October 1994. The foundry operated as the Mansfield Foundry Corporation/Citation Corporation until 2002 when the foundry closed its doors.
The city of Mansfield acquired the old foundry on July 11, 2003 and the property remained vacant up until its demolition date.
“We couldn’t really find much to do with it,” said Theaker. “At that time, it was a decent building but over the years it has started to deteriorate quite a bit, and in the deterioration finally we decided the best thing to do is to try to tear it down.”
With the hard work of Economic Development Director Tim Bowersock, the city obtained a number of EPA grants used to tear down the foundry and clean up the property. According to Theaker, the overall cost of the foundry’s demolition could land anywhere from $1.2 to $1.4 million.
“It’s great (to get the grants) because we just came out of fiscal emergency, which means we’re just breaking even,” said Theaker.
Approximately 191,114 square feet of building is scheduled for demolition. Various clean-up activities include asbestos abatement, PCB oil removal, transformer removal, lead soils removal, and an underground heating oil storage tank removal will occur.
An estimate of 1,783 gross tons of scrap steel and metal will be derived from the scrap metal from the demolition, and will be utilized to pay for the above grade demolition activities.
“The very first thing we have to do is there needs to be more abatement to get rid of the asbestos – that’s only in the one section of the building,” said Theaker, who explained the rest of the building has already been abated. “After everything is torn down the next phase is to take the foundation out, so they’ll remove the foundation. That has to be part of another bid that we have to take care of. We can only do portions of it, the abatement and the tear down and the next phase is getting rid of the foundation.
“Asbestos is always a big challenge because it’s something you can’t just dispose of; you have to take it to a hazardous waste dump,” he added. “So that’s always a big challenge.”
Theaker estimated the demolition of the foundry is expected to be complete within two to three months, with the entire site remediated by the end of the year.
According to the grant application, Town & Country Co-op, a full service agricultural cooperative headquartered in Ashland, will acquire the project site upon completion of the site demolition and remediation activities. The existing paved area will be utilized as a staging area for inbound grain shipments for their nearby grain elevator operation.
“It’s really impressive, I was out here last week and they had just started (demolition),” said Theaker. “And you can see, now there’s a lot going down.”
Leading the demolition effort with the S&S Demolition crew is supervisor Toney Bluester, who has worked on and off for the demolition company for the past 14 years. Bluester has a unique connection with the company’s current demolition job – he also worked at the Mansfield Foundry for six years before its doors closed.
“I was here when they locked it down,” remembered Bluester. “I got up one morning and I came to work, and our paychecks and service checks were at the gate, and they said we are no longer open. They told us we were in a contract negotiation and we were waiting on them to accept our contract, but they never did.”
According to Theaker, anywhere from 500 to 700 employees worked at the foundry. Bluester remembers the foundry being the only source of survival for many of those families.
“It was a shock to a lot of people who were working here (when it closed),” he said. We had three shifts of people depending on feeding their families and all of a sudden the doors are locked.”
Though the foundry has remained vacant for a number of years, Bluester said he recognized everything in the building after walking through before demolition began. Now, as a part of the demolition crew, Bluester feels his story with the foundry has come full circle.
“It’s a sad day here; everything is going to go down and it’s going to be level ground here pretty soon,” he said. “I’m sad to see it go.”
Theaker noted he recognizes the nostalgia associated with the demolition of the historical building, but said he has set his sights on the future of Mansfield.
“It is hard because there have been a lot of people that have worked there, but one of the things I emphasize is to try to clean up the city,” he said. “We’re getting rid of eyesores to make Mansfield look nicer because that way when people come into the city, it doesn’t have these gigantic eyesores out there that they look at and say man, ‘I don’t really want to come to Mansfield.’ But if we can clean it up, then that makes Mansfield more presentable to bring people here.”
“We’re getting rid of eyesores to make Mansfield look nicer because that way when people come into the city, it doesn’t have these gigantic eyesores out there that they look at and say man, ‘I don’t really want to come to Mansfield.’ But if we can clean it up, then that makes Mansfield more presentable to bring people here,” said Mayor Theaker.
