bySubmitted
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was originally published on Richland Source in 2014.
MANSFIELD — This photo essay tracks three footnotes in American Popular Culture that were named after Mansfield, Ohio. These are: Mansfield Tire, Martha Mansfield, and Mansfield, Washington.
Mansfield Tire
In 1912, the Richland Buggy Company on Newman Street could see that the age of automobiles was about to obliterate their market. So, they reinvented themselves as a manufacturer of one thing the automobile couldn’t do without: tires.
At that time there were 100 employees turning out 500 tires a day. By 1923 there were 700 tiremakers at the plant and 6,000 traveling salesmen were selling Mansfield Tires all over the U.S.
In the 1930s and ’40s, there were Mansfield Tire signs all over the country that made Mansfield a familiar name to everyone whether or not they needed tires. From full-page advertisements in the Saturday Evening Post to roadside billboards in every major city in America, people from Mansfield could see their city in bold-faced print.
Then in the late 1970s, when industries all over the world were collapsing, Mansfield Tire closed up shop. There were 1,721 workers who saw their jobs disappear. Just as disappointing to our city was the end of the era when the name of Mansfield was woven into the fabric of American life.
Martha Mansfield
She didn’t really come from Mansfield, Ohio, but she liked to tell the movie magazines that Mansfield was her hometown. The characters she played in the movies were mostly sweet and innocent country girls, and it didn’t hurt to have it generally assumed that she actually was that girl … so she fondly and wistfully spoke of her hometown in Ohio, and changed her name to Mansfield.
Actually, she was born as Martha Ehrlich in New York City. Her family split apart when she was a child and her little sister went off to live with relatives in Mansfield. Martha visited Mansfield different times in the summers, and received her first theatrical notice in the Mansfield News at the age of 12 when she starred in a local production of “Romeo & Juliet.” She played Romeo.
As a classic beauty who radiated charisma, her career launched early and skyrocketed in New York and Hollywood, where she was sought as a fashion model, a stage actress on Broadway and a Ziegfeld Follies girl, a sidekick in early silent films and then a leading lady and screen idol.
And like a skyrocket, her career was brilliant and short. By the age of 24 she was gone — accidentally killed on a movie set when her costume went up in flames.
Her stage and movie career spanned barely a dozen years, 1912-1924, but for that brief time Mansfield, Ohio was proud to lend her its name. In 1920, Photoplay Magazine wrote, “She has perhaps posed for more cameras than any other girl in the world.”
Mansfield, Washington
Some time around 1900, a couple of young men from Mansfield, Ohio, named R. E. Darling and Earl Freeman, hitched a ride west and landed in the State of Washington in the great wheatlands plateau near the Cascade Mountains. There they laid out a town, hoping that someday soon the railroad would find its way there to gather the terrific grain harvest.
They named the little village after their hometown, and in 1911 the Great Northern Railway did, indeed, find its way to Mansfield, Washington — the “town at the end of the rails.”
Actually, the tracks stopped about a mile and a half away from town, so the whole place picked up and moved — house by house — over to snuggle up next to the business zone.
During their great boomtown period around 1913, the town had a population of 1,500. Before the train stopped coming in 1981, the area shipped out some 3.2 million bushels of grain per growing season.
Today the railroad is gone and the population holds steady at around 320, but the wheat just keeps coming. Driving into town from the west is not unlike driving into Mansfield, Ohio from the north: the terrain is perhaps a bit more horizontal but the first prominent landmark you see from a distance is nearly identical — tall white grain elevators.
Timothy Brian McKee is a featured columnist on our site every Sunday with a column titledNative Son.Every Tuesday, he taps into his knowledge and collection of historical photos and bring us Then & Now, a brief glance at the way things were.
Timothy Brian McKee grew up in Mansfield and started gathering local history when he was in the 6th grade, but left here in the 1980s with no intention of ever returning again. After a number of years in California he realized that what he knew best was Richland County history, and that if he had anything to offer the world it was here. So he came back home and has spent the last fifteen years telling our story in books, paintings and film.
