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EDITOR’S NOTE: This storyw as originally published at Richland Source in 2014. Part I of this essay was republished last week on June 20, 2020. During the 19teens, the number of silent picture theaters in downtown Mansfield took a quantum leap. After spending generations of life confined to one’s own mundane experience — seeing only […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published on Richland Source in 2014. Bright photographs made of light — photographs that moved — suspended in the dark like dreams that had been captured in the night and put on display.  It was a totally new kind of theater in the first decade of the 20th century, where the […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published on Richland Source in 2014. Some of the oldest buildings that survive in downtown Mansfield are standing in the block of South Main Street that faces the Square. The “newest” of all the business buildings in this block is Mechanics Bank built on the Park Avenue corner in 1926. […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story originally published on Richland Source in 2014. Everybody loves to feel free, and there is little that is more freeing than being at the wheel and having the open road in front of you. Think how especially freeing it must have been in the 1920s and 30s when, after decades of […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2014. The Vasbinder Fountain is a landmark in downtown Mansfield, but it is also a special bookmark among the pages of early memories of Mansfielders. People remember being near it as a child, and the memory is warm with sunny goldfish, and gentle raining […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was originally published on Richland Source in 2014. At its heart the Richland County Fair has not changed at all since the first time it was held in 1849: it’s all about agriculture.  Beyond that fundamental basic there isn’t much about the Fair that has not completely changed — including the […]

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2014. There are different phenomena of nature in America we can experience in our lives that are so epic, so hugely beyond the ordinary, so grand and soul-lifting that when we witness them our spirits are awed and transported to a rarely tuned awareness […]