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MANSFIELD — Going east out of downtown today, the primary thoroughfare of Park Avenue East splits into Route 42 and Route 430, creating a triangle of business properties. In the 1920s that triangle of land between the two routes was still one big field. The huge grassy expanse was a popular ball field at that […]

People who grew up in Mansfield speak of the Madison Theater in such a way that you would think the place was still open for business. That is easy to understand: places lodged in the heart never go away — even when the site has been an empty lot for 30 years. The Madison was […]

MANSFIELD — It was February or March sometime in the 1970s. We had just figured out how to get up on the roof of Malabar High School. It was one of those sparkling clear winter nights with a full moon and we knew the view from up there would be pretty spectacular with the neighborhood […]

When the photographer set up his tripod in the 1890s to capture this image of North Main Street, he was standing in the middle of a traffic lane and his equipment probably straddled a streetcar track. Capturing the same scene today entails considerably much less risk since the camera is a half dozen paces away […]

There was a time, and it wasn’t all that long ago, when you could walk down Park Avenue West on a sunny afternoon and hardly set foot in the sun—it was such a cool, shady canyon of a city scape. Today the pavement of Park Avenue downtown dries much more quickly after the rain because […]

At the turn of the last century Miss Susan Sturges felt very strongly that everyone in town needed the benefits of belonging to a Congregational Church. So, if folks in the north end of town weren’t going to travel down to Park Avenue West to attend First Congregational, then she would build a second Congregational […]

There are not a lot of buildings left in Richland County that are built of our distinctive native sandstone, but fortunately the First Presbyterian Church still holds its ground in Shelby and glows with that rosy pinkish aura in the morning sun. It was built in 1901 when Gamble Street was still a quiet, tree-lined […]

“The right of the people peaceably to assemble:” it is a democratic empowerment so fundamental to the essence of our nation that it is inscribed prominently into the very first Amendment to the Constitution. As a core value so central to defining our American personality, it is significant that when folks in Richland County practice […]