The history of Mansfield

A castle-like prison rose on a Civil War camp

The Ohio State Reformatory is a Victorian Gothic prison in Mansfield, Ohio, now open as a museum and film tourism site. Its stone towers and turrets still loom over Olivesburg Road, built to look less like a jail and more like a cathedral.

The ground it stands on once held Camp Mordecai Bartley, a Civil War training camp named for a former Ohio governor. Construction on the prison began in 1886, with architect Levi Scofield mixing Gothic, Romanesque and Queen Anne styles into one design. Scofield believed the building's grandeur could push young offenders toward a better life. He gave the brass doorknobs the Ohio state seal and lined the halls with marble arches that gave way to steel bars. Supervising architect Friedrich Ferdinand Schnitzer ran the job site for 24 years, his name carved into the cornerstone. Funding ran dry again and again, so the walls rose slowly, one appropriation at a time.

The prison opened on September 15, 1896, before it was even finished. Its first 150 inmates, all young men on their first offenses, arrived by train from Columbus. They were put straight to work, digging the prison's own sewer system and building the 25-foot stone wall meant to hold them in. The name changed that same decade, from the Intermediate Penitentiary to the Ohio State Reformatory, a softer term for a harder place.

By 1919, after 33 years of construction, the final wing was finished. The East Cell Block went up six tiers high, the largest free-standing cellblock ever built. It was meant to be a stepping stone between a boys' reform school and the state penitentiary in Columbus, a place for young men to be corrected rather than punished. That purpose would not last. The prison built to reform first-time offenders was about to become something far more violent.

Two guards were killed during escape attempts

On November 2, 1926, a paroled inmate named Philip Orleck tried to break back onto the grounds. Guard Urban Wilford, 72 years old, confronted him and was shot dead. Orleck was caught two months later and executed at the Ohio Penitentiary the next year.

The reformatory's mission changed after a disaster elsewhere. In 1930, a fire at the Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus killed 320 inmates. Officials moved hardened criminals out of that prison and into Mansfield, mixing them in with teenage first offenders. Violence climbed fast.

By 1932, the strain showed. On October 2, twelve inmates jumped guard Frank Hanger during an escape attempt and beat him to death with an iron bar. Two of them, Merrill Chandler and Chester Probaski, were convicted and executed in the electric chair in 1935.

The warden's wife died in his own residence

In 1950, Helen Glattke, wife of longtime warden Arthur Glattke, reached for a jewelry box in a closet of their on-site residence. A handgun fell and fired. She died three days later of pneumonia brought on by the wound. Arthur Glattke, the reformatory's longest-serving warden, ran the prison from 1935 until 1959, when he suffered a fatal heart attack in his own office.

The prison's population kept swelling past its design. By 1969, it was taking in men serving life sentences for murder, a sharp turn from its original purpose of reforming first-time teenage offenders. The reformatory built as a halfway step toward Columbus's state penitentiary was becoming a maximum-security prison in all but name.

A film saved the prison from demolition

After closing, the state began tearing down the outbuildings and the stone wall. Local preservationists stepped in and stopped the rest of the demolition. Then, in 1993, the reformatory was chosen as the filming location for The Shawshank Redemption, and the attention that followed helped save the building for good.

In 1995, residents formed the Mansfield Reformatory Preservation Society to restore and run the site. It reopened that year as a museum, offering tours through the same cellblocks and the warden's quarters where Helen Glattke died. Visitors today walk past sets built for Shawshank and take ghost tours through the East Cell Block, where staff and guests have long reported cold spots and the smell of roses tied to Helen's memory. Cell 13 carries its own story, tied to an inmate said to have set himself on fire there.

A short walk up Olivesburg Road, the Richland Correctional Institution has held men since 1998, a newer state prison built not far from where the old one stood.