Mansfield Memorial Museum opens Saturday
MANSFIELD - When the Mansfield Memorial Museum opens its doors for the season on Saturday, visitors will be able to learn about the city’s manufacturing history, military history and more.
Scott Schaut, curator at the museum at 34 Park Avenue West the past 24 years, said the museum was opened in 1892 and reopened in 1999. The building is the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Building and it is the first memorial building built in Ohio and the last standing. The building is one of the oldest continually used veterans meeting halls in Ohio.
The Mansfield Memorial Museum was founded in the meeting hall of the Grand Army of the Republic following the Civil War. Now called the Soldiers and Sailors Building, it is only natural that an extensive collection of military memorabilia and artifacts would find a permanent home there.
The museum features artifacts from all American wars — the Revolutionary War, Spanish-american War, the Civil War, World Wars I & II and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The museum collections includes a uniform exhibit showing the progression of military clothing from the Mansfield Militia pre-civil War, Civil War, Indian War through the Spanish-american War; a large exhibit of model military tanks, armored vehicles, and trucks from a collection built by Tom Weekly that took over 37 years to compile; and a collection of model aircraft featuring the history of aviation from the Wright Brothers through Desert Storm built by the local Air National Guard from 19641987, according to the museum’s publicity information.
“The museum is very eclectic and there is something for everyone,” Schaut said. Two floors are open to the public.
Schaut is always actively trying to find industrial artifacts, catalogs and more from Mansfield. He found a mop bucket at an estate sale and paid $95 for it.
“It’s a great example of something that was patented and actually manufactured in Mansfield,” he said.
Schaut said the patented mop bucket was made by the Bushnell Novelty Co. in 1916 in Mansfield. The company started operations in the 1890s.
The “Breweries and Bottlers of Mansfield” exhibit continues as the coronavirus pandemic caused the museum and many others to remain mostly closed in 2020.
An 84-year-old robot remains the museum’s most popular attraction.
“Everyone comes here to see Elektro and it will be our draw and until I’m dead,” Schaut said. Elektro is the nickname of the robot built by Westinghouse Electric Corp. in Mansfield between 1937 and 1938. The robot could walk by voice command, speak about 700 words, smoke cigarettes and move his head and arms.
The robot, which stands 7 feet tall, will be donated to The Henry Ford Museum in the name of the Weeks family. On the museum’s second floor is a collection of anthropomorphic animals, including birds, frogs, mice and more.
“This has been done for centuries,” he said.
Also, $25,000 of $40,000 has been raised for the startup of the adjacent aviation museum. He said the museum is very grateful for the donors.
“The major expenses we have are cutting the door, doing the landscaping, getting the gas switched over and the electric and me building the cases myself,” he said,. “We’re still collecting any aviation-related material. We’re getting another 8-foot wooden propeller next week. We’re trying to add more to it but the variety that will be at the aviation museum will be different than a lot of the museums you see. It will be small,” he said.
When open, the aviation museum will have the same hours as the Mansfield Memorial Museum. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays and noon to 4 p.m. Sundays. Admission is free. Volunteers were busy dusting the museum this past weekend and Schaut said the floors will be mopped and waxed, including the stairwells, by Saturday’s opening. lwhitmir@gannett.com 419-521-7223
Twitter: @Lwhitmir