MANSFIELD — Jordon and Talon Baker weren’t sure if they wanted to stay in Mansfield when they got married eight years ago.
The young couple joked that if they did stay in their hometown, they wanted to live somewhere special.
“I always wanted a Victorian on Park Avenue,” Talon said. “That was the thing — if we’re going to stay here long-term, let’s try to get one of those.”
The Bakers made that dream a reality four years ago. They purchased their home at 317 Park Avenue West when their oldest child Ophelia was a baby.
Dubbed the Susan Sturges home, the house was added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1983.
According to the Ohio Historic Inventory, the home was constructed around 1880 in Italianate style. The original owner, Susan Sturges, was a prominent community leader and local philanthropist.
Most of the original owners of Park Avenue Victorians were prominent and well-to-do, architect Daniel DeGreve said.
“Park Avenue West started off as a primarily residential street. It was where all the leading families of Mansfield lived,” said DeGreve, a member of the Mansfield Historical Preservation Commission.
DeGreve estimated that at least a third of those homes are no longer standing. The historic homes that remain are architectural gems, remnants of the street’s heyday in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
After falling out of fashion in the mid-20th century, Victorian-style homes don’t necessarily attract the town’s wealthiest residents. Some have been split up into apartments or converted into businesses.
Others have been purchased by adventurous owner-occupants willing to take on the challenge of keeping them up.
“It almost breaks my heart how people talk about Mansfield,” Jordon said. “If you just have a little bit of vision and are willing to work, there’s five-, six-bedroom houses all up and down this road — old craftsman style houses that are selling for less than $100,000.
“I know it’s not for the faint of heart and there’s a lot of concerns with it, but there’s so much opportunity.”
The Bakers say turning their new house into a home took years of work.
When they bought it, the upstairs had extensive water damage. There were cracks in the walls. Birds were living in the attic. There were holes in the roof.
They purchased the property from an older couple who operated an antique store there.
“We had to kind of convert it back to a home,” Jordon said. “There wasn’t even a washer and dryer hookup. There wasn’t a shower. There wasn’t a kitchen.”
Today, the interior looks like a home magazine spread.
There are rich, dark-hued hardwood floors and 14-foot ceilings. A grand arched entryway, oversized doors and folding shutters are all original to the home. Cozy black marble fireplaces adorn the living and dining rooms.
The door to the staircase features an intricately carved brass handle with a bird in flight against a paisley escutcheon.
The Bakers have decorated with antique furniture and houseplants.
But even now, the family is dealing with the unexpected challenges of owning an old home.
After a couple of years, the couple thought they’d finished the major renovations. Then they took Ophelia to her 2-year-old check up.
‘Our kids were getting poisoned by our home’
The pediatrician ran routine blood tests, which showed a blood lead level of 6 micrograms of lead per deciliter (mcg/dL) of blood.
Health experts say that any level of lead exposure can have negative health impacts, particularly on children.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention uses a reference point of 3.5 mcg/dL to identify children with above-average levels.
Lead is most commonly found in homes built prior to 1978, usually in paint.
The Bakers had done home renovations prior to and after Ophelia’s birth, but they’d always been careful.
They assumed their home would have lead-based paint and took every precaution they knew. They partitioned off rooms and laid down plastic sheeting. They removed their shoes when they came indoors. They cleaned carefully after each project.
The Baker’s pediatrician told them to go home and wet mop every surface of their home, including their children’s toys, with a special solution.
Talon and the children temporarily moved out of the house to stay with family. She and Jordon spent their evenings meticulously cleaning.
“We spent hours literally wiping every single surface down,” Talon recalled. “Our house was so clean, it smelled like a hospital.”
Six months later, Ophelia’s blood levels hadn’t gone down. The pediatrician checked her younger brother Avery’s levels too. He had a blood lead level of 14 mcg/dL.
“That was really confusing to us because he was not born when we were doing all the construction in the home,” Jordon said.
“Our kids were getting poisoned by our home. We were frustrated trying to figure out where it was coming from, cleaning everything and still not getting any solutions.”
After Avery’s blood test, an inspector from the Ohio Department of Health came to the Baker home with a specialized radar gun that can detect lead through layers of walls and flooring.
“They did samples of everything in the entire home,” Jordon recalled. “They were probably here for a total of 14 hours.”
The inspection revealed lead lurking in an unexpected place — the gleaming wood floors that extend from the formal dining room into the living room.
“At the time, (our son) was just learning to walk and picking up stuff on the floor putting in his mouth, teething,” Talon said.
The Bakers said the floors were likely refinished with lead-based varnish by a former owner.
“Lead varnish was a really premium product in the 1970s. It cost a lot of money,” Jordon said. “When they were rehabbing the home and getting it put on the historical registry, they used the best product available to them at the time.”
The floors weren’t the only source of lead inspectors found.
Their visit generated a 31-page report of mandatory remediation measures. Many of the windows need replaced. The entire exterior of the home required encapsulation, as did the offending floors inside.
“You don’t want dust particles, so ripping up flooring is the worst-case scenario. That’s not what you want to do,” Jordon explained.
“That’s going to stir dust up in the home and you’re never going to be able to get it out.”
By default, the Bakers had 90 days to respond to lead remediation order from the Ohio Department of Health.
Jordon said the state granted their appeal for more time. They spent the months that followed applying for grants to help cover the cost.
Lead remediation work comes with exacting guidelines and contractors need special certifications. The work their home needs will cost around $200,000 to complete.
“Faith is really important for both of us. We prayed a lot,” Jordon said. “We really felt God open the door for us to buy this home four years ago.
This is where we were doing ministry.”
The couple managed to secure enough to cover the cost through three different grant programs.
One is Lead Safe Ohio, a program locally administered by the Richland County Land Bank.
$1.35 million ‘a drop in the bucket’ to address lead in Richland County homes
Lead Safe Ohio provides funding for remediating lead in homes, childcare facilities and congregate shelters. The land bank received $1.358 million in program funding last year from the Ohio Department of Development.
Richland County also has a disproportionately older housing stock, which can increase the risk of lead exposure for residents.
In Shelby, nearly one-third of housing units were built before 1939. In Mansfield, it’s one in four.
Land bank manager Amy Hamrick said administering the Lead Safe program has been rewarding.
In addition to helping people, she hopes the program will prevent properties from ending up in the land bank’s possession in the future.
“This is our way to do some prevention,” she said. “It’s a great feeling. I can’t think of a better thing to be working on right now.”
Hamrick said the land bank board has received about 60 applications and committed nearly three-fourths of its Lead Safe funding so far. She’s hoping to secure even more funding in the future.
“At the end of May there’s a claw-back period where the Ohio Department of Development will claw back money from counties that can’t spend it,” she explained.
“If they do have communities that can’t spend it, I want to be in line to get more.”
Hamrick said she’d also like to see Lead Safe funds become a regular part of the state budget, rather than a one-time program.
“I think everyone hopes that the state will see how great it’s going and how much good it’s doing and that they’ll include some money in the general fund,” she said.
“This is just the beginning. With the number (of applications) coming in right now, I think we’re going to be able to award somewhere between 15 and 25 grants. It’s just a drop in the bucket.”
Lead remediation work will take one to two months to complete
Jordon said working with the land bank and other state agencies has been a positive experience overall.
“They want to help. They don’t want to see people have to move out of their home,” he said.
Talon agreed.
“Every single person that we’ve worked with has been equally concerned for our children,” she said.
“That’s been really impactful for us to see how much people care about the families in our community.”
Jordon said the lead remediation work will likely take one to two months to complete. The grants the family is receiving require the work to be in contract by the end of May.
“They have until the end of 2025 to finish the work, but they anticipate starting and finishing much sooner than that,” Jordon said.
In the meantime, the Bakers continue to keep their home spic and span.
Their children take regular iron supplements to help lower the amount of lead absorbed into the bloodstream. The family spends most of its time together in the kid’s playroom, where inspectors found no lead in the original flooring.
Further tests have confirmed their blood lead levels are now dropping.
“We have (the house) to the point right now where it’s safe,” Jordon added. “We have special cleaning products.
“But it’s temporary. It makes it safe enough, but it’s not the viable long-term solution.”