When this photo was taken more than a hundred years ago, the corner of Fourth and Main was the de facto center of town: new businesses, hotels, offices, all wanted to be as near to that intersection as possible because that’s where all the traffic was. It was the dawn of the Lincoln Highway—America’s first highway running from coast to coast—and all the automobiles tootling cross country passed through Mansfield on Fourth Street through this crossroads.
The city blocks nearest Fourth & Main were the most crowded with buildings; those buildings were the most crowded with stores and apartments. It took a few generations before all that excitement and activity was forgotten, and then sometime in the last decades of the century most of the buildings in this photo were empty, so they were quietly removed from the background.
Today, this intersection is once again growing in vitality. It is a sense of space that is different than 100 years ago, with a very different kind of urban aura that suits the new century.
