Timothy Brian McKee, History Columnist

EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2018. There was one year in the 1970s when it got really cold early enough in the winter season so that by holiday vacation the lakes were already frozen solid. It seemed too good to miss, so we made plans to meet on Christmas […]

Senator John Sherman had a large presence in Mansfield for a half century even if he wasn’t actually here most of that time.  He certainly had a large home in Mansfield…actually more of a mansion.  It was so large that Harper’s Weekly said a wagonload of hay from the Senator’s farm might easily be driven […]

Elizabeth Sherman was born on Park Avenue West just a couple blocks off Central Park, so her playground growing up was the public square, in front of her father’s office. At that point in Mansfield’s history—1857—the park was only newly established as a green space, so she got to watch the young grass become established […]

The snow storm in 1913 left “two feet on the level, and drifted in places so that it was more than six and seven feet deep.” Traffic was tied up, and business in general was “demoralized.” When the photographer set up his tripod in front of 105 N. Main Street, he was capturing the snow […]

There are all sorts of small, incremental steps on the road from ignorance and intolerance, to the place where people are equally respectful and supportive of one another in a community, regardless of race, class, ethnicity, gender, capacity, or beliefs. The length of the stride is measured in significance largely by the decade in which […]

When this photo was taken of St. Mark’s Lutheran Church on Springmill Street in 1909, it was so new the ground was still broken. At the time, it was referred to in the papers as ‘St. Mark’s Fifth Lutheran Church,’ because it was the fifth congregation of Lutherans in Mansfield. It had originated a few […]

I remember as a kid, reading about how our town got the name Mansfield, and being somewhat underwhelmed that it was named after a guy who never even set foot here. And the history went on to say that it was given that name by the founders of the town because Mr. Mansfield was their […]

We pretty much take it for granted today, and don’t particularly notice the underpass on Park Avenue East: it is simply a landmark on the way through. But in 1925, when the roadway was dug out underneath the railroad tracks, that bit of road was a miracle: it meant that traffic was no longer backed […]

When the house lights begin to dim, and the footlights are rising like the first of dawn: that is the moment when the lines blur between worlds of daylight reality and limitless fantasy. The lights go down like your eyes closing for the night, and then, when the spotlight suddenly splits open the dark, whoever […]