MANSFIELD — A book report by Blair McClenathan helped Mansfield procure $250,000 in funding to restore the historic Vasbinder Fountain in Central Park.
After the city’s deputy engineer Tuesday explained to City Council how the plan that will utilize a grant from the Richland County Foundation, city engineer Bob Bianchi offered a historic explanation of his own.
“Can I say something about the Vasbinder Fountain that Blair probably wouldn’t tell you? I just want to give you some history there,” Bianchi said after lawmakers approved the restoration project.
“Blair on his own time did a book report … that’s what he does on his spare time … on the history of the fountain.
“Coincidentally, Richland County Foundation said that there was a donor that had some interest in putting some money in the downtown and happened to like and have an affinity for the history of the fountain,” Bianchi said.
“So we were able to send that book report up to him and turned around a $250,000 donation. So that was pretty neat how that came together,” he said.
Before then, McClenathan went into details on the city’s plans originally donated to the city on July 4, 1881, by David and Jane Vasbinder.
He told council the fountain will be taken apart and shipped to a company for a “complete restoration” of the historic structure on the south side of Park Avenue East.
He said work on the cast-iron fountain will be sandblasted to remove layers of paint that have been applied over the years and will be recast as needed.
“It’s very difficult to get a good assessment of what the condition of that cast iron is. So we’ll know really what we have once it’s sandblasted,” McClenathan said.
Concrete that was placed into the nine-foot diameter bowl during a restoration effort in the 1970s will be removed, he said.
“Some of the embellishments over time have been lost. So those will be recast. There’s actually a foundry in Georgia that owns the original molds for this fountain that has been used by the city in the past to recast a portion of it,” McClenathan said.
He said the interior plumbing of the fountain will be replumbed to improve the “water show” the historic fountain provides.
“What we’re planning on doing is installing a manifold inside the base of the fountain where we can directly plumb to each of the bowls, so we can have more water coming out of the top bowl and it’ll trickle out of the figure at the top,” McClenathan said.
The plan calls for the work to be done and the fountain returned to Central Park.
It will then be re-assembled by June 26, 2026, with the potential for a re-dedication 145 years after it was originally opened for its watery business, done around the same time as the Main Street Corridor Improvement Project is scheduled for completion.
It won’t be the first time the fountain has left the park. In fact, the fountain was gone for two decades at one point.
The city “sold it for scrap” in 1958 to James Pugh, who owned land that is now part of Malabar Farm State Park near Lucas, including the famous “Pugh Cabin.”
The city made the decision to get rid of the fountain when it paved the road through Central Park, breaking it into two halves, south and north of Park Avenue.
Pugh, fortunately, never scrapped it, according to city Public Works Director Louis Andres, who was the manager at Malabar Farm for 22 years.
“James Pugh today would be considered a hoarder. He never threw anything away,” Andres said in 2024 when the fountain was returned to its flowing state.
Instead, Pugh gave it to his friend, Louis Bromfield, who placed the fountain in a lower terrace garden near the pond before donating it back to the city when it requested it in 1979.
The city, led by then-Councilman Dan Stevens, had the fountain restored and placed back in the park. It was rededicated on July 4, 1979.