Things To Do In Mansfield Ohio

On Location: Mansfield, Ohio's 'Shawshank' Industry

This summer, as we explore the places where iconic American movies were filmed for our series "On Location," we've discovered that often, long after the cameras are packed up and the crew goes home, a film can leave an imprint on a town.

In recent decades, Mansfield has fallen on hard times. Westinghouse, the Tappan Stove Co., Ohio Brass, and Mansfield Tire and Rubber have all closed plants in Mansfield since America's heavy manufacturing boom went bust. The latest casualty: the local General Motors plant, which closed just last year. All in a city of fewer than 50,000. But at least one closure has brought with it a strange bounty.

After nearly a century of use, the Ohio State Reformatory closed its doors on New Year's Eve 1990. The massive prison on the outskirts of Mansfield is a combination of three architectural styles: Victorian Gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque and Queen Anne. If that doesn't mean much to you, let me put it this way: It's gorgeous — and terrifying. Which may explain why Hollywood thought it would make a perfect Shawshank Prison.

Earlier this summer, tour guide Ron Puff walked me through the Reformatory. We began in the east cellblock, at six tiers high the largest free-standing steel cellblock in the world. Approximately 600 cells, 7 feet by 9 feet, held two inmates each. And that's just the east block, which was not used in the movie. But it's amazing how much of the Reformatory was used. Puff gives me a Shawshank opened in theaters in September 1994, audiences largely ignored it. Even after seven Oscar nominations, the film struggled to find an audience. But home video and cable changed that.

Lee Tasseff, the president of the Mansfield and Richland County Convention and Visitors Bureau, was in Mansfield when the filmmakers came looking for a prison, and he is thanked in the film's credits. A few years after the movie opened, he says, his phone started ringing. And then people started showing up.

"They were random, and we never knew where they were coming from," Tasseff says. "Sometimes it was somebody from Korea; the gentleman who hitchhiked from England just stopped into our door."

I call them the Shawshank experience.

"In order to immerse myself into the experience," he says, "I wanted to go with actual images printed out of the movie so I could compare it back to real scenes when I was actually there in person.