Demo Photo Set #12

These were taken on April 17th, the entire building is down and most of the rubble has been hauled away. Perhaps some of the foundation and ground level floors will remain in place as part of the necessary grade from Cottage Street down to Church Street.

This is Room #007 (with apologies to Ian Fleming), last used as the Art Room but in our day it was one of two study hall and lunch rooms at the base of the south staircase. It had a deep window well on the Cottage Street side and the iron door to the legendary tunnel on the north side. In the photo below the demo has exposed the south wall of the 1914 section (the earliest portion). That part ended at the entrance to the tunnel, seen at the extreme right. A later addition extended the Cottage Street portion of the building by one classroom and a staircase. For some reason the upper floors of the new portion were several inches higher and the hallways had a gentle downward slope as you walked north.

The debris, the brickwork, and the old Christian Church made it easy to indulge myself with shots like the one above. But it also nicely illustrates the history of the building. Inside those brick walls is the unexcavated ground in front of the 1870's original high school. The Cottage Street section of the new building was constructed that close to the existing structure whose basement was used to house the forced air heating system for both buildings. The lower wall in the middle of this enclosed area contained the main heating and return ducts which then ran the length of the tunnel in a north south direction. When the north addition (running along 4th street) was built, it included a boiler room and the structure converted to steam heat. At that point the 1870's school was demolished and the main gym built on its foundation, encasing the old heat exchangers in rooms to the west of the locker rooms.

In the above photo the brick foundation on the left is the old coal bunker, the ramp to its right was where the entrance to the inner courtyard was located, and the wall on the right was the south wall of the girls' gym; the door in this wall opened to an outside stairway leading up to the courtyard. The arched entranced to the courtyard from 4th Street contained several hatches through which coal was poured into the bunker from delivery trucks. The school used coal for heating longer than almost any business or residence in the area, on the calmer winter days there was a cloud of smoke over this area of town. Apparently there was a coal company in Mansfield that stayed in business because of their one large customer in Ashland and closed shortly after the furnaces were converted to natural gas.

This is the interior of the steam plant in the sub-basement on the northeast corner of the school. Buried in the rumble between it and the coal bunker is a stairway that led down from the hallway under McDowell auditorium.

The oddest thing about this moment is that this is the spot where I stood for three years (1962-65) waiting to be picked up by the school bus, never imagining that 50 years later I would be standing here looking at such a vista of complete desolation.