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EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2015. If you wanted to take in a movie in the summer of 1919 all you had to do was stroll down North Main, not far from Fourth Street, and fork over a nickel at the Star Theatre. That year you could have seen […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published on Richland Source in 2015. SHELBY — People cry at weddings. They cry when folks die. Tears accompany bookmarks in time: events consequential enough that we mark chapters in our lives as happening before or after them. Two significant bookmarks we see in our communities are weddings and deaths. […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2015. When you’re driving toward downtown Mansfield on Lexington Avenue and get stopped at that light where it meets South Main, and you’re casting your gaze idly around the intersection waiting for traffic to resume, this is the old house that will catch your […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2015. It started out innocently enough. In 1886 JC Woley approached Henry Hedges downtown and asked if he could dig a hole on some land Hedges inherited on the east end of First Street down by the tracks. He promised to put the dirt […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2015. For most of Mansfield’s history the mainstay of its economic vitality has been industrial manufacturing, and for roughly 100 years of that time — from the 1880s to the 1990s — nearly all of the factories that put our city on the map […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2016. I had to wait until it snowed before I could write this. It is a memory that is awakened only by snow. Every year when the atmosphere turns suddenly thick and dark with falling snow, so that the neighborhood gets more three-dimensional as […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published in 2015 on Richland Source. It wasn’t that long ago when the land on the west side of South Trimble Road was under cultivation. The neighborhood of the Crossings, the complex of the Ohio Cancer Specialists, and the Waterford at Mansfield all sit in the cropland once belonging […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published on Richland Source in 2015. ANKNEYTOWN — If you drive south of Bellville on the Ankneytown Road, right after you leave Richland County and right before you hit Ohio 95 you’ll pass through the little hamlet of Ankneytown. In the old country a ‘hamlet’ became a ‘village’ when it […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2015. When Mansfield was first laid out in its initial shape in 1808, the southwest corner of town ended at the top of a hill, and Mulberry Street stopped there because of the deep gully where Ritter’s Run flowed. It wasn’t until 1909 that […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2015. The land that is Johns Park was donated to the city in 1907, though the neighborhood around it — known then as the Johns Addition — was in place since the 1890s. Within the first decade of its life the park grew a couple […]