Oak Hill Cottage

Our Fund Raising Campaign This Year

We've breathed new life into to the old Tenney Tool Building this year, across the street from the Cottage, by creating the terrace park in place of its view-obstructing upper floor. The space in the lower level of the building is being used as a workshop and storage space for large items like the old Courthouse cupola, and an unrestored Herring buggy. Nevertheless, there is plenty of space remaining to create a proposed Richland County Permanent Collection storage space. The Permanent Collection is envisioned as a repository for significant local documents and artifacts that have no home or have been rejected or displaced by Richland County museums.

In the past we've relied on other museums in the county to save artifacts covering the wide spectrum of local history, but with the ongoing conversion of the Memorial Museum downtown to a military-only facility, there is a gap that has opened up in Mansfield historical collections, and other disruptions with museum collections are possible in the future. We have stepped up to begin accepting locally significant artifacts, with a goal to preserve them, make them available digitally online, and store them in an archival environment. While we do not plan to create a museum of our own, objects in the collection will be available to other museums and organizations for loan.

Our fund raising campaign this year is to raise the seed money that begins the planning and design process for a permanent archival storage facility.