Springfield, OH

Springfield, Ohio — the venue in the event records, the Clark State Performing Arts Center, settles which of America's many Springfields this is (a note for the registry) — earned its nineteenth-century nickname "Champion City" from the Champion reapers and mowers that its factories shipped to the world's farms; at its height the city was among the leading farm-machinery centres on earth, and International Harvester's works defined it for a century more. The countryside repaid the debt in an unexpected way: in 1902, in Clark County, the educator A. B. Graham founded the boys' and girls' agricultural clubs that grew into 4-H, the great rural youth movement.

The city keeps two architectural treasures: the Westcott House, Frank Lloyd Wright's only Prairie-style house in Ohio, meticulously restored; and downtown's Heritage Center in the grand 1890 city hall and marketplace. The Clark State Performing Arts Center — whose Kuss Auditorium is reckoned among Ohio's finest concert rooms — brought a full touring season of orchestras, opera and Broadway to the city when it opened in 1993, run by the community college whose name it bears, and it is the hall documented in this archive. Reapers, 4-H and Wright: Springfield's champions were practical ones.