Mansfield Ohio - Former Industrial City

2 April 2013: Once An Industrial Town

Note my neat dodge of the whole April Fools thing, maybe it will be subject for discussion next year if I am still toiling away at this blog.

Today's Mansfield paper (on-line) leads off with an article about a failure to clean-up the debris from the demolished Westinghouse factory at 245 E. Fourth Street. Which got me thinking about Ashland's industrial neighbor ten miles to the west. As a child I visited Mansfield on the occasional shopping trip and doctor's visit. Our family did not socialize with anyone there although there were plenty of former Mansfield people who lived in Ashland and plenty of Ashland people who worked in Mansfield.

Both communities grew from British and German immigration in the nineteenth century, with the workforce supplemented by white Appalachian migration in the twentieth. Southern African-American workers also poured into Mansfield but only a handful lived in Ashland. The city's population was about 50,000 (more than double that of Ashland) and the metro area was about 125,000.

While Ashland had a manufacturing base, Mansfield had Westinghouse, the largest manufacturing concern in the area between the 1920s and 1970s. Once 8,500 employees worked there in sixteen buildings on forty-two acres, turning out stoves and refrigerators. Westinghouse occupied several blocks on the eastern side of downtown Mansfield, and we would drive through this area each time we visited the city. It was an ancient facility with countless buildings squeezed together over the years, the result of numerous expansions. Most notable was a covered walkway bridging 5th Street which we would drive under a couple blocks after leaving Route 42. There wasn't much to see from the outside except for numerous loading docks and groups of workers standing on the sidewalks taking their breaks.

In those days Mansfield was humming along at near-full employment, making stoves, tires, steel, machinery, refrigerators and autos (the new Fisher Body Plant was even bigger in size than Westinghouse). You could go to any factory in Mansfield and get a job. But things began to change in the 1970's as the industries started to leave Mansfield. Dominion Electric (1971), Mansfield Tire and Rubber (1978), Hoover Plastics (1980), National Seating (1985), Tappan Stoves (1986), Westinghouse (1990), Ohio Brass (1990), Wickes Lumber (1997), Crane Plumbing (2003), Neer Manufacturing (2007) and Smurfit-Stone Container (2009).

By an odd coincidence in the late 1990's I worked for the corporation that acquired what had been "Ohio Brass" and eventually closed the facility. It was ancient, the union was confrontational, and we had excess capacity nationally. Mansfield had become a citadel of hillbilly proletarian militancy, and this tradition was still alive. The union was told that without certain concessions the plant would be closed. They thought it a bluff but it wasn't. GM closed in 2010 for much the same reasons and apparently the workers were again taken by surprise; amazing given the series of plant closings over the preceding four decades.