Ohio State Reformatory

Levi Scofield designed a prison to look like a castle on purpose. He wanted the men inside to feel they could be reborn.

The Ohio State Reformatory at Mansfield went up between 1886 and 1910, slowly, because the funding kept running out. Scofield, a Cleveland architect, worked in three styles at once, Victorian Gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque and Queen Anne, and gave the brick and concrete frontage its castle face. The purpose of the institution matched the architecture. It opened as the Intermediate Penitentiary, a halfway point between the Boys Industrial School at Lancaster and the State Penitentiary at Columbus, intended for young first-time offenders.

The ground had a history before that. In 1862 the field was a Civil War training camp called Camp Mordecai Bartley, named for the Mansfield man who served as governor of Ohio in the 1840s. The city raised 10,000 dollars to buy 30 acres, the state acquired 150 adjoining acres for 20,000, and the finished facility cost 1,326,700.

Arthur Lewis Glattke was warden from 1935 to 1959. He arrived as a political appointment and by all accounts earned the respect of professionals and inmates alike, bringing in reforms including piped radio music in the cell blocks. His wife Helen died of pneumonia in November 1950, three days after a handgun discharged as she reached into a jewellery box in the family's quarters. Glattke suffered a heart attack in his office and died on 10 February 1959. Over 200 people died at the reformatory across its working life, two of them guards killed during escape attempts.

The end came through the courts. A prisoners' class action citing overcrowding and inhumane conditions produced the Boyd Consent Decree, and District Judge Frank J. Battisti ordered the prison closed. Delays in building the replacement pushed the actual closure to December 1990. Most of the support buildings and the outer wall have been demolished since.

The building survived because Hollywood wanted it. Plenty of films used it, some while it was still operating, but The Shawshank Redemption shot most of its scenes here in 1994. The preservation society now runs history tours, escape rooms, a haunted house called Blood Prison and paranormal investigations, and it employs an archivist who publishes from the institution's own records.