MANSFIELD — Richland County commissioners on Thursday approved spending up to $125,000 to help preserve an important piece of Westinghouse history in Mansfield.
The funds will help save a mammoth stone and brick entry from the Fifth Street side of the former Westinghouse “A” building, a badly-aging vacant property due to be demolished as soon as this fall.
“(Westinghouse) is a big part of the community,” Jennifer Kime, Downtown Mansfield Inc. CEO and local history lover, told commissioners. “We have a lot of industrial properties in town that are all really important.
“Westinghouse undoubtedly was really a cornerstone of our community for a long time. And like many of us in this room, we have connections to it. The community feels a deep connection to Westinghouse and we lost so much of Westinghouse already,” said Kime, whose grandfather once worked at the manufacturing site.
“This is almost like one of our last chances to really do something really generational for people to reflect on Westinghouse and its meaning to the community,” she said.
The six-story “A” building, along with an adjoining 13-acre concrete slab, has largely sit idle since Westinghouse ceased local operations at the end of 1990, a massive factory that once employed more than 8,000 local residents
A $4 million project, including $3 million from the state, has been approved to demolish and remediate the site, now owned by the Richland County Land Bank.
Westinghouse Preservation Proposal
Kime, who made a similar presentation to the Land Bank board in May, told commissioners she will make a request to Mansfield City Council to share in the cost of the work.
Joined at the meeting by Alan Wigton, president of the Richland County Historical Society, Kime asked commissioners to guarantee the full amount in the interim.
She said approval would allow historical officials to move ahead immediately with the plans to preserve the entry way for free-standing placement on the site after the “A” building is torn down.
The entry way will include a plaque with verbiage showing the historical significance of Westinghouse in Mansfield, including the women’s history working there.
The Land Bank will open bids for the demolition effort on July 29 and demolition could begin quickly once a contractor is selected.
Kime and Wigton told commissioners the Westinghouse is eligible under identified criteria for the National Register of Historic Places, which provides certain legal rights for local residents in the face of demolition.
The “A” building was constructed in 1919-1920 and was a cornerstone of the community for seven decades, building a variety of Westinghouse products.
One of the essential elements of the Westinghouse history locally was the significant number of women who worked there. One such group Kime said was called the “Westinghouse Girls,” who produced a product called Cozy Glow.
A letter from Kime and Wigton to the Land Bank in April said the local historical society, the City of Mansfield Preservation Commission, the Mansfield Memorial Museum and the Mansfield Industrial Museum wanted to preserve the entry way “as a relic of our industrial past and a symbolic doorway to the future generations of women workers who have followed in the path of these trailblazers.”
Wigton told commissioners it would be nice to preserve the entry way on the spot it now stands, but “nobody has bought into that being possible.”
Alternately, he said, historical preservation experts have told them the entry way needs to be taken apart before demolition and then reconstructed at the site.
“It can be set back more from the road to prevent salt damage and so forth. But I think putting it on a piece of the shop floor would be a really excellent option,” Wigton said.
Commissioners had expressed the thought of using American Rescue Plan Act funds for the project. However, county Administrator Andrew Keller said that would not be possible.
“This is a project the commissioners will likely need to appropriate money to the Land Bank,” Keller said. “The commissioners don’t own this property and will not own this property. The commissioners do have the legal authority to appropriate general fund dollars to the (Land Bank). That’s probably how this will need to go.”
