What's under downtown Mansfield? Workers open caves

Helping with logistics were Geoff Hielman, Wesley Burson and Derrick Johnston of HobbyTown in Ontario, who sent a remote-control truck inside a shaft directly behind the former National Electric Supply at East Fourth and North Diamond streets, which is being transformed into a restaurant by the Taylors.

Luttrell said on Wednesday he was called by Adena officials to come to the site and drop his snake camera down the shaft a new feet outside the north side of the former National Electric building.

"We dropped that down and all we could do was look around," Luttrell said. "We could tell there was some tunnels there. It was extending much further. It dropped down probably 22 feet and the openings down there, you could stand in. There were a good five to eight foot (tall)," Luttrell said.

Luttrell said people got to talking and wondering if a drone could be flown underneath the ground.

So a few HobbyTown employees came out with a drone and remote-control truck.

Thursday morning, the remote-control truck was dropped down.

"We explored and found the tunnel went 30 to 40 feet to the west and turned left to the north and we think it comes down under Temple Court (east). There's another entrance that 's covered up with (a pallet of) bricks and it's possible it might get dug out in the next few days," Luttrell said. 

The Taylors' property is believed to have two underground, man-made caverns used long ago to store beer at a Mansfield brewery, reportedly 15 feet tall, 80 feet long and 30 feet wide.

Mounds of dirt have been excavated this week behind the old lighting store on the north side of the hill.

The crew of people at the scene set up a generator for lighting and took flashlights inside the tunnel beneath the North Main Street massage parlor building, where a drive-in garage was once used. Nothing much could be seen, Luttrell said.

Plans may include making a lower-level parking lot for the Taylor's restaurant at the rear of the old massage parlor, according to a spokesperson for Engweiler Properties, a real estate developer in Mansfield. 

Crews are not sure if the tunnels turn or connect to each other. One cave reportedly goes to North Diamond Street, Luttrell said.

In February, the Taylors announced plans to open a new, upscale restaurant at the site, featuring a deli, gift shop, outdoor patio seating and a winery on the lower level.

The Taylors are moving their already-successful downtown Cypress Hill Winery, currently on the lower level of The City Grille, down the street to the 51 E. Fourth St.

An opening has been made in a brick wall of the National Electric building for the winery's new entrance.

The new restaurant will be called Hudson & Essex, as the building was once used to sell Hudson and Essex cars in the early 1920s at what was then The Hieber Motor Company. National Electric Supply Co. most recently occupied the building, until the longtime business closed earlier this year.

Construction crews are working inside the soon-to-be restaurant, set for opening by year's end.

Al Hogan, who operated an MG car shop on Diamond Street across from the Mansfield post office from 1978 to 1988, told the Taylors the caves existed.

Hogan came to the scene Thursday, sharing information about the two stone caves and a passageway he said goes under East Temple Court to an access tunnel that goes south toward East Fourth Street.

"Off of that are two stone caves which go west toward Diamond Street. The story goes they used to store the beer there from a brewery," he said. "The previous owners of National Electric didn't know the caves existed."

Hogan said in the next few days, the Taylors may be able to do down inside the cave.

"There's no wood. There's no steel. There's a few bricks and the rest of it is sandstone," he said. "There's just a dirt floor."

As to the future use of the Taylors' caves?

"A really, really cool restaurant that would make Castle Keep look like a McDonald's," Hogan said with a laugh.

According to the late Virgil Stanfield, a columnist who worked for the News Journal, beer and ale were produced in Mansfield for at least 60 years, starting about the Civil War period. Germans who arrived here in large numbers in the mid 1800s started making beer on a small scale and then the breweries began to grow.

Many of the small firms were swallowed up by the big breweries and others couldn't afford the cost of remodeling their plants to stay with the competition. Since the Renner and Weber and Frank breweries were in the vicinity of the Big Spring in Mansfield, many people thought the brewers used the spring water to make their beer. That was true at first, but soon the breweries found they needed more water than the spring could provide so they had to dig their own wells, according to Stanfield.

There are still underground passages in the east side of the city where the beer was kept to cool and age before refrigeration was available. Ice was used to cool the beer for a time and much of it came from a pond near the modern Armory on Ashland Road, Stanfield wrote in one of his many, many columns.

lwhitmir@nncogannett.com

419-521-7223

Twitter: @LWhitmir