Mary Ann Williams grew up in Canoe Camp in the 1840s and 50s in a Welsh immigrant family. She and her husband George worked on her father's farm until 1863 when George's family in Kansas needed their help to rebuild their fire damaged hotel.



After farming for almost twenty years on a hundred acres in Kansas, George died in an accident in 1880. Mary Ann turned the Kansas farm over to her youngest daughter, and in May 1882, she headed west on the Oregon Trail. Travelling ten to 15 miles a day it was a long, hard journey and a once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

Using diaries, letters, and news accounts, Mary Ann's descendant, Eve Whittall of Washington state, converted her story to historical fiction. We can follow Mary Ann's life from Pennsylvania to Kansas to the west on her grueling Oregon Trail venture.

The book, "A Legacy for Mary Ann" won a Book Fest award in 2025 for historical fiction. Eve and her daughter will come to Mansfield in April to visit for the first time, the place where Mary Ann started. They will also visit graves in Blossburg and view the area of their ancestors.

A book signing at The History Center on Main Street Sunday April 12 from 2 to 4 PM will give us a chance to meet Eve and hear Mary Ann's story. The event will include a poem put to music about Mary Ann's life. Help us welcome Eve to her ancestral area. Oregon Trail posters will be given to attendees. Books will be available for purchase. Call or text us ahead at 570-250-9829 or histcent83@gmail.com to reserve a book.

Gene Dewey - A Lifetime of Service

Arthur Eugene (Gene) Dewey was born in Sullivan Township in 1933. He graduated from the Gray Valley School and Mansfield High School in 1951, West Point in 1956 and studied at Princeton University.

After a 25-year military career he spent the rest of his life in national and humanitarian service. His life came to an end in February at age 93 while still actively engaged in service.

The roster of his achievements is truly overwhelming. The White House, the United Nations, the U. S. State Department are among his sphere of operation. Much of Gene's life's work involved refugees and world hunger issues. In 2016, he was given West Point's Outstanding Graduate Award.

Gene was known for breaking down barriers and getting resources where they were needed. I am providing this link which is the best I have found of his career achievements. It includes a review of his activities and remembrances from people who worked with him. In Memoriam: Arthur Eugene 'Gene' Dewey, A Life of Service and Compassion - World Hunger News

Through a lifetime that took him almost everywhere on the planet, Gene maintained his Mansfield friendships. He was in regular touch with Mansfield classmates and still owned the family home in Sullivan Township where he liked to spend hunting season

We are very pleased that Gene has shared items and photos from his career with us, even when our museum was started in my humble barn. He was a History Center member from our start, one of our earliest life members.

Membership Renewal Due

Membership in the History Center is a valuable part of our support. Members receive 3 to 4 issues of Voices from the Archives annually with stories highlighting our town and its people. Memberships expire 31 Dec unless you have already renewed. The mailing label on your issue includes your membership expiration date. We have continued to send the journal to members for a year after expiration. If your label says 31 DEC 2024, you will receive no more issues. If it is 31 DEC 2025, renew soon. Renewal card will be included with the journal.

You can send your check by mail or you can pay by PayPal. Click from the Membership or PayPal button below.

New to the Building

Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we have installed climate control air conditioning in the archive room, the library rooms, and the kitchen/workroom/conference room. This is essential for the preservation of our collections. We intend to install in the auditorium in the near future.

Upcoming High School Class Reunions

No new reunions scheduled yet for 2026. If your class is planning a reunion this year, let us know and we'll be glad to welcome you to our museum for an hour or two of remembering Mansfield.

Our Library: History and Genealogy

 Our History-Genealogy Library is open any time the History Center is open. We invite you to stop by to browse, dip into volumes, do research, or just sit and read. We can search our database if you are looking for some specific book or topic. You can also check out a volume on loan to take with you.

Online Collections | History Center (pastperfectonline.com)

It's a slow and time-consuming process, but we continue to add new items to our online collections. Particularly, we have added to the individual biographies of our local people. While we collect obituary and other information for all our local burials, checking them over in detail before we click to add it to the upload take time. There are already 5,000 biographies uploaded, some with photos, and many more thousands just waiting for a final check. You'll find them in the Browse by Term - People section, alphabetic by name at birth.

Take a look. The ONLY way to learn your way around this utility is to read the guidelines and poke every link. Just explore, go wandering. You'll be surprised.

You will find lists of people (all by name at birth), lists of subjects, or try searching on keywords which is just about anything. Our genealogy database of local connections includes over 100,000 individuals. Over 11,000 of them are also included in our museum files with links to schools, cemeteries, businesses, etc. People are only included online if we have an object or photos associated with them, although they are in our files if they are/were local (lived here, buried here, went to school here). If your family is not shown, send us photos so they can be.

You can select Random Images and follow something that catches your eye.

Try searching for advertisements. They link to businesses and the life stories of the people who ran them, and even the buildings they operated in.

You can also link to the online catalogs through our landing page at joycetice.com.

We have lots more fine-tuning and linking to do for our online presentation, but you'll be surprised what you find when you get lost in our files.

Renewed Members - New Members - Join us for 2026

We'd like to have twenty new members for 2026. As a bonus, we'll send each of them an earlier journal issue from 2019 to 2024 in addition to the 2026 issues as they are published. You can send a check or pay by PayPal. Directions link from the button at left.

If you are planning a reunion, consider a casual afternoon Meet & Greet at the History Center's Museum of Us. In an informal environment, you can chat with your friends, watch a slide show of Mansfield's historic photos, and find traces of yourself, your friends, and your family. Many of our exhibits are designed for those who grew up here. The Blue & Gold Room is full of MHS sports mementos. The pictorial display includes YOU along with all the other MHS graduates in its first hundred years.