Area History

Driving up South Main Street out of downtown, the road forks where Lexington Avenue diverges and, sitting on the point of the hill—looking out with a view over the entire heart of Mansfield—there has been a church on that site for nearly 100 years. In the 1920s when the building was new it was called […]

There was once a corner of American History, as time swept around the bend, when an entire subculture of Americans lived and thrived who don’t really exist anymore. These were the Hobos—a wholly nomadic population whose travels around the country took place skirting the law, as passengers on the trains who had no ticket. It […]

The clubhouse at Westbrook has been looking down over the north end of town from its high hill since it was laid out in 1908, though it hasn’t always been the same building. The original structure pictured above burned in 1940, and was replaced in 1942 with the present plantation-style manor house that is a […]

When you go to Westbrook from the center of Mansfield, you’re not going ‘west,’ and when you get there you won’t find anything like a ‘brook’ because it is situated up on the top of a hill. In order to understand why that particular name is attached to the most beautiful park in the city, […]

When most people think of Charles Mill they picture a scenic lake on the east coast of Richland County, but the name originated from a site that was an actual mill once, grinding grain for farmers. The grist mill, photographed here in 1901, was so busy in the 1800s that it spawned a small settlement […]

Long before Bexley Hall was a part of Kenyon College, the building was the site of an Episcopal seminary school founded in parallel by the college’s founder, Bishop Philander Chase. For many years, before the organization broke off from Kenyon and relocated elsewhere, it served as a training ground for ministers for the Episcopal Church, […]

Sometimes, when everyone’s at each other’s throat about politics, drastic things can happen. Like that time when treason was committed on the square in Mount Vernon … if that’s what happened. It depends on whom you ask. Major General Ambrose Burnside, and by extension, his boss, Abraham Lincoln, thought it was pretty much treason to […]

Most of our famous natives achieved their renown in the world by virtue of their accomplishments: what they made, or what they wrote, or what they did. We have, however, one local who became well known all over the US, yet he never made or wrote anything; and all he really did, in the way […]