Group founds Warren Heritage Center

By Ed Runyan

runyan@vindy.com

WARREN

Longtime area residents remember when Warren was a bustling industrial and cultural center, but today’s Warren children might not know about that or have pride in the significant place Warren holds in the history of Northeast Ohio.

“There are so many stories to be told, and they are not being told,” said James Valesky, a Warren councilman and the president of the newly formed Warren Heritage Center.

Valesky announced the creation of the organization Thursday from the first floor of the historic Kinsman House on Mahoning Avenue Northwest, just north of Courthouse Square, which will serve as the organization’s home.

“There’s no Warren Historical Society,” Valesky said. “If you wanted to learn about the history of Warren, there’s no one place you can go to learn it.”

Valesky, a lifelong Warren resident, said you can hear older people in coffee shops talking about the 1950s, how they saw shows at the Robbins Theater, shopped downtown and how the city’s neighborhoods had such ethnic diversity.

The city also had manufacturers known worldwide, such as the water-fountain maker Halsey Taylor.

“Many of the names have faded away. You don’t even hear about them anymore,” he said.

On top of that, the city, which calls itself the Historical Capital of the Western Reserve, was the county seat of Trumbull, which in the early 1800s covered all of northeast Ohio, the entire 3-million acres of the Connecticut Western Reserve.

There also are many famous names connected with Warren, such as Wean, Packard, Warfield, Armstrong and Darrow, he said.

“It’s important as people of Warren that we understand who we are and how we got here,” Valesky said.

To that end, the nine members of the Warren Heritage Center board have been meeting for more than 18 months to put the organization together.

On Wednesday night, Warren City Council commended the Heritage Center board for its goal of “telling the story of Warren, with special emphasis on Warren’s role as the first economic and judicial center of the Connecticut Western Reserve, collecting, preserving and interpreting objects that emphasize the uniqueness of the City of Warren.”

Board member Kathryn Hellweg, former Warren superintendent, said she discovered that the children in the schools “didn’t have a sense of who they were, and the attitude toward Warren has been kind of negative. They didn’t realize its incredible history.”

Discussions with the city are not final for an agreement to use the city-owned Kinsman House, but the plan will be to install temporary displays, perhaps borrowed from other existing collections, in order to provide educational opportunities for children, Hellweg said.

Eventually, the Heritage Center will have its own collections, but the organization will need to generate funding in order to pay for that, Hellweg said.