MANSFIELD, Ohio — Before the steel rails came, the Marsh and Barney stagecoach made one round-trip a week between Sandusky and Mount Vernon, the Mansfield News Journal reported.
Convoys of wagons laden with grain for the port of Milan would take more than a week to struggle up the muddy roads that cross Richland and Huron counties.
Local industry was confined to making whatever could be consumed in the surrounding community. Except for the rich, with their wagons or buggies, most people walked everywhere. Everywhere usually was within a mile of home.
When steel rails replaced muddy ruts, the world literally opened up for this former frontier community, just as if a four-lane interstate highway had replaced a weedy trail.
The first train chugged into Mansfield to the foot of Walnut Street hill on May 16, 1846.
Before long, trains would be taking Mansfield’s volunteer soldiers on the first leg of their journey to the war in Mexico. A few years later they would carry recruits to Columbus, where Ohio was gathering men to fight in the Civil War.
Vaughn Neel, a veteran New York Central employee and a rail historian from New London, said the line from Sandusky to Mansfield was one of the first built in Ohio.
“The next one was the line built down from Cleveland to Crestline,” Neel said. “The interlock between it and the Sandusky, Mansfield and Newark was one of the very first in northern Ohio.”
Because that route from Cleveland bypassed Mansfield, this city never had a direct rail connection to Cleveland. Mansfield was on the main lines of the Pennsylvania and the Erie railroads, both running from New York City to Chicago. For many years the line running from Newark to Willard was a main Washington, D.C.-to-Chicago run for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad.
Neel said the railroad succeeded because many farmers simply gave them the land to build on. “A lot of farmers hoped the railroad would establish depots on their property,” he said.
If the farmers took the railroads to court, the courts always seemed to find in the railroads’ favor, Neel said. Those steel rails were the future.
The first railroad in Mansfield was highly anticipated. The early newspapers said the line was held up by a deep cut through a hill in Plymouth. Mansfield residents walked up the graded way to watch the rails being laid down. Huge crowds greeted that first train, whose screeching whistle sent horses and humans running.
Local railroads reached their height of service during World War II. Neel said 100 trains a day were running between Crestline and Mansfield.
The first effect of railroads was to end this area’s industrial isolation. It was the start of a process now called globalization. The Mansfield Machine Works was first in line, turning out reapers and mowers on North Main Street that could be loaded onto freight cars and sent to customers several states away.
Mansfield was a city where farm equipment, cigars, crackers, pumps, kitchen appliances, beer and stoves were mass-produced. Every town in the area had a factory or two and a grain elevator, joined to the world by a switch line connected to a busy railroad. Eventually steel would join that production parade both in Mansfield and Shelby. The railroads were a major industry with huge, sprawling yards in Mansfield, Crestline, Willard and Bellevue. Sidings poked into every industrial corner of town.
When jobs opened up and workers were needed, they came north on the trains. Be it a shack or a glamorous brick union station, the entrance to every city and town was its railroad station.
Until highways and trucks took over in the mid-20th century, railroads were the kings of American transportation.