Mansfield, Ohio: The Shawshank Prison and the City That Saved It

Mansfield is a city in north-central Ohio that has been shaped by three things: a surveyor's name, a senator's legacy, and a movie filmed inside an abandoned prison.

The town was laid out in eighteen oh eight by James Hedges, Jacob Newman, and Joseph Larwill, who named it after Jared Mansfield, the surveyor general of the United States. John Sherman, who would later author the Sherman Antitrust Act, studied law here. Johnny Appleseed, the real man named John Chapman who spent decades planting apple orchards across the Ohio frontier, lived in the area for nearly twenty years and is commemorated by a local monument.

But what draws visitors today stands on the northern edge of the city: the Ohio State Reformatory, a Victorian Gothic castle of a prison designed by Cleveland architect Levi T. Scofield and built between eighteen eighty-six and nineteen ten. Scofield blended Victorian Gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque, and Queen Anne styles into a structure meant to inspire rehabilitation through beauty, its soaring towers and arched windows designed to lift the spirits of first-time offenders and redirect them toward honest lives. Instead, the Reformatory eventually housed the worst criminals in the state, and the world's largest freestanding steel cell block, six tiers and six hundred cells of iron and shadow.

When the prison closed on December thirty-first, nineteen ninety, the building faced demolition. Then in nineteen ninety-three, the filmmakers of The Shawshank Redemption, adapting a Stephen King novella, chose it as their primary location. The film became one of the most beloved in American cinema history, finishing at the top of the Internet Movie Database's all-time ratings list for years. The Ohio State Reformatory, scheduled for the wrecking ball, became a pilgrimage destination. A nonprofit formed to preserve it, and the Shawshank Trail, established in two thousand eight, now guides visitors to fourteen filming locations across the Mansfield area. The prison that was meant to be torn down turned an entire city's economy around.