CFHS Photography Field Trip- Kingwood Center Gardens and Mansfield Reformatory
On a cold, rainy day in April, the Chagrin Falls Photography students went on a field trip to Kingwood Center Garden and the Mansfield Reformatory. After an hour and a half bus ride, the students arrived at Kingwood Gardens, which is a 47-acre garden and was established in 1926, but did not open to the public until 1953. They were not too thrilled with the rain, but after seeing all the colorful flowers, everyone was excited to take pictures. One good thing everyone got out of the gardens, in spite of the rain, was the rain drops on the flowers which created great pictures. The Kingwood Garden also had a greenhouse where many of the students escaped the rain. In the greenhouse were lots of beautiful flowers to photograph. After an hour of wandering the gardens, the students got back on to the bus to drive to their next stop, the Mansfield Reformatory. When they arrived at the reformatory, most students were eager to get inside and start the tour, but a few were scared that it would be haunted. Inside, nobody had any problems finding things to take pictures of with the peeling paint and old pipes sticking out of the walls, cracked linoleum, and the old architecture of the building. At the beginning of the tour, the students learned that the penitentiary was built in 1834. The designer, Levi T. Scofield, designed the building to look like a castle on the outside. The reformatory operated as a prison for over 100 years and after housing 155,000 inmates, it closed in 1984. As the students toured the living quarters, where the owner and his family lived, they made their way to the many rusted, small jail cells. Seeing the jail cells and looking down to see that you were two stories up off the ground freaked out a few students but they continued on the tour. Towards the end of the journey through the reformatory, students had taken the required pictures they needed and many more. On the way back to Chagrin Falls, the students looked through their pictured and talked about the field trip. The next couple of weeks the students will work on editing and looking through their pictures from the field trip to complete their final exam.