MANSFIELD — The history of Mansfield is being preserved image by image through a new crowdsourcing effort created by and for the community.
The Mansfield Memory Project, a community effort to collect images, videos, stories, documents and art related to Mansfield, held its inaugural collection event on Saturday at Relax, It’s Just Coffee. The goal is to provide access to free digital copies of all curated materials through a public website.
Ken Dudley, creator of the Mansfield Memory Project, made it his goal on Saturday to “meet, greet and digitize” the historical artifacts he came into contact with on Saturday. Armed with high-speed photographic scanners to digitize collections from 1 to 200 images, Dudley’s goal is to provide high-resolution content on the Mansfield Memory Project’s website.
“It’s literally a tapestry of things that happened in the community,” Dudley said. “There are a lot of people that have small collections of images; we’re looking at securing them all in one place to share with the entire community.”
Although Saturday was the first in-person collection day, the Mansfield Memory Project first started uploading images to its site in October. While Dudley hopes to grow the project into a larger organization, currently it’s being fueled by his own time and capital in-between his day jobs as a marketing manager at Gorman Rupp and owner of Laxton Hollow Brewing Works in Lexington.
This passion comes from a of history that runs in Dudley’s family; his grandfather was an amateur historian in Richland County, and Dudley has been interested in the medium since at least the age of eight.
“I’ve heard heartbreaking stories of tremendous loss over the last 20 years, where things have ended up in landfills because someone cleans out someone’s house and they don’t realize what they have,” Dudley said. “There’s a lot that has been lost. I’m trying to keep that from happening much more, if I can.”
The Mansfield Memory Project does not collect physical assets. Everything contributed is simply scanned, profiled and posted; every exhibit remains the property of the owner. The purpose is to preserve and share Mansfield’s history by encouraging anyone who has a piece of history to share it, either with credit or as an anonymous contributor.
Currently the project is specializing in collecting photos of buildings, parks, streetscapes and businesses at work in downtown Mansfield. Duplicates and modern images are also welcomed.
“This is particularly important because there are a lot of changes that go on with buildings over time,” Dudley said. “I think everyone needs to be aware of what things looked like before, before they make decisions.”
For example, Dudley said nearly every parking lot that can be found in downtown Mansfield today was once, without exception, a building.
“It’s the grander buildings that came down first,” he said. “Every gap you see in-between buildings was once a department store or opera house or hotel. Some of it was very big-city style and it’s been lost.”
Periodically, public events will be held where smaller collections – even just one picture – can be scanned and added to the collection in real time. Dudley hopes to expand the collection to portraits, artwork or even video footage in the future.
Anyone wishing to participate in the Mansfield Memory Project can contact Dudley at info@mansfieldmemory.org or look at upcoming events on Facebook or the project’s website.
“Even if I only get one or two things that were otherwise locked in somebody’s attic, then to me it’s worth it,” Dudley said.
