MANSFIELD — As October drew to a close in 1900, Mansfield had the attention of the entire nation for a brief and somber moment.
That was when the the city’s favorite son, Sen. John Sherman, came home for the last time after his death on Oct. 22, 1900. He was laid to rest here, at home, with pomp and ceremony.
It is perhaps difficult to imagine today — over 100 years later — just what Senator Sherman meant to Mansfield. But it is significant that so long after his life was over his name is still stamped on this city in maps with parks and streets and institutions.
For nearly 50 years in the 1800s people here and across the nation got used to associating John Sherman with Mansfield in U.S. newspapers and in the Congressional Record.
Though he kept a home in Washington D.C., where his life focused, he always considered himself a Mansfield resident. He was proud to claim our city as his hometown to reporters and in the text of his Senatorial speeches.
His home in Mansfield was without question the largest mansion in town, which was an apt symbol to indicate the esteem with which he was regarded here.
It was in Mansfield where Sherman first began his law practice before he ran for Congress. He developed such a keen legal mind that he became one of the most powerful lawmakers in the U.S. Government for recognizing the laws needed to shape society.
It is notable that the Sherman Antitrust Act still bears his name, and still 125 years later his name is regularly invoked with that law in courts around the country, on Wall Street, and in Congress.
He was employed on Capitol Hill for nearly 50 years, and it wasn’t because nobody of consequence ever ran against him. He lasted because Ohio recognized his value.
He ran for President in four successive national election years, and in at least one of those races he was a very promising contender for the Republican nomination well into the convention balloting.
He was lifted out of the Senate during the Rutherford B. Hayes administration to serve as Secretary of the Treasury, and again during his last years, during the William McKinley administration, to be Secretary of State.
It is fair to say that he rose in the nation’s consciousness steadily and continually from the time of Abraham Lincoln, when he loudly supported Emancipation in the heated debates, until the end of his career, when he put his job on the line in order to oppose the Spanish-American War.
By the turn of the century he was the last man in Congress who had taken part in the great debates that ushered in the Civil War, and his death represented the end of an era.
It was altogether fitting that the nation officially said goodbye to him at the end with the most dignified honors possible. It was also meaningful to Mansfield that this rite of national passage took place in the streets and in the hearts of our town.
Click on any image in this story to see all the illustrations in a gallery.
Images come from the collections of Bob Carter, Betty Angle Fox, Virgil Hess, Sherman Room of the Mansfield/Richland County Public Library, and Richland County Chapter Ohio Genealogical Society.
