Area History

As with many great ruins, sometimes all you can find to indicate the presence of a noble history are a few rocks; and if time has been kind they are still stacked one atop another. This is the story of a graceful and glorious chapter of Mansfield’s past. True to classic centers of culture from […]

Editor’s Note: This is an ongoing series which runs each Thursday morning titled the Richland Chronicles Volume 4, by author Paul Lintern. It is set in the 1830s and tells the story of Richland County through the eyes of young people. This is the fourth in a series. Volume 1 was Amelia Changes Her Tune. Volume II was Isaac and […]

After the Civil War, when towns all over the country were petitioning Congress for old cannons to decorate their town squares, Mansfield was given four huge cast iron beauties that weighed 8,500 pounds apiece designed for coastal defense. They stood guard on the Square for about 70 years, but when the city decided to cut […]

Just like the path of the sun and the moon and all the planets, the principal route into Mansfield is from the east. If you have entered from the east on U.S. Route 30 you know this thoroughfare has the most commanding view of the city. In fact, if the guardians of the city were […]

One of the fascinations of the Big House at Malabar Farm State Park is they way it seems to have remained untouched through the years. Most of the family’s furnishings remain as they were at the time Louis Bromfield left this world in 1956, so it is easy to feel like the place is preserved […]

Louis Bromfield had a lot of creative energy flowing in a lot of different directions. The internationally-acclaimed author from Richland County was prodigiously successful in the worlds of American literature, agriculture, film entertainment and politics; and his celebrity spanned coast to coast in the 1930s and 40s as his opinions were voiced weekly on the […]

Editor’s Note: This is an ongoing series which runs each Thursday morning titled the Richland Chronicles Volume 3, by author Paul Lintern. It is set in 1831 and tells the story of Richland County through the eyes of young people. This is the third in a three-book trilogy. Volume 1 was Amelia Changes Her Tune, while Volume II […]

People who were working in Mansfield during the big industrial boom of the 1950s often talk about the abundance of employment opportunities at the time by saying that a worker could walk out of one factory job and walk across the street to get hired on the spot at a new job. One of the […]

A hundred years ago it was not uncommon, while walking in cities and towns all across the United States, to encounter noble goddesses of ancient Rome. The concept of embodying abstract ideals into divine personas is certainly nothing new to centuries of civilization, but it seemed to hit a high water mark in America during […]