The day the crew was due to start work at the Ohio State Reformatory was the day the state had booked the wrecking ball. Dennis Baker, who ran the working prison next door, said the machine was already on site and that people got on the phone to have the demolition held off. The building got a stay, then a buyer at one dollar, and it now sells tickets.
16
places on the route
Fourteen of the places are inside 45 km of north-central Ohio; one is 3 300 km away in the Caribbean — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
The film says Maine and means Ohio. Mansfield, Ashland, Butler and Upper Sandusky sit inside about 80 km of each other, and the one place far from that box is the beach at the end, which says the Pacific coast of Mexico and is 3,300 km away in the Caribbean. Inside Ohio the substitution goes one level deeper. The prison front, the warden's office, the parole board room, the showers and solitary are the Reformatory. The cellblock, where the audience spends most of the film, is a four-storey wooden set that was built inside a shut-down electrical factory 2.7 km down the road, and the wood shop where Figaro comes over the tannoy is an hour's drive west. Some of it opens to visitors. A county court will show you the room when it is not sitting, the prison runs tours seven days a week in season, and one stop is a hayfield with a fence around it and a request not to climb over.
The whole surviving complex seen across the field: the administration building on the left, the two cellblocks running away to the right. The perimeter buildings and the 25-foot wall that appear in the film were pulled down shortly after the shoot.
Inside the administration building. The interiors the film used most — the warden's office, the parole board room, the boarding-house room — are all on this side of the prison.
A real cell at the Reformatory. Darabont said the crew could not shoot in these — they were too small to get a camera crew inside — which is why the cellblock in the film was rebuilt in wood inside a disused factory a few miles away.
Ohio Historical Marker 4-70, on the drive at the Reformatory. Its last line is the state's own summary of what happened after 1990: 'It has served since as a setting for several major motion pictures.'
Producer Niki Marvin spent five months looking at prisons across the United States and Canada. What she wanted was a building with no period attached to it and nobody in it, and this one had been standing empty since the last day of 1990, when a court order over conditions inside finally took effect after years of delay while a replacement was built.
Most of what happens indoors in the film happens in the administration building: the admittance and orientation rooms, the warden's office, the parole board hearings, the showers, solitary, the library, which is a storage room now. The room where Brooks lodges after parole, and where Red later takes the same bed, is inside the warden's quarters here, though the front of that building is downtown. One cellblock scene was shot in a real cell, the one where Elmo Blatch tells the story of the murder Andy is serving two life sentences for. Darabont's account of the rest is short: the cells were too small to fit a camera crew into.
The complex ran to fifteen acres in 1993 and all of it was standing when the crew arrived. The outer buildings and the twenty-five-foot wall that appear on screen came down not long after the shoot. What is left is the administration building and the two cellblocks, and there is a trap in that for anyone arriving with a camera. The east block, six tiers and six hundred cells, billed as the largest free-standing steel cellblock in the world, is the photograph everybody takes and it is not in the film. The fake sewer pipe Andy crawls out through is, and it is still propped up on a low platform inside.
Two other productions worked here while the place still held prisoners: Harry and Walter Go to New York in the mid-1970s and Tango & Cash in 1989, the second under the warden's own terms, which ruled out shooting an escape scene and ruled out using his inmates as extras. Air Force One came four years after Shawshank and left something behind. In the room the film used as the prison cafeteria there are large portraits of Lenin and Stalin, left on the wall after the 1997 shoot. Escape Plan: The Extractors, Judas and the Black Messiah, Shelby Oaks and The Wind is Watching have all filmed here since, and Godsmack shot the video for "Awake" in the building in 2000.
The preservation group that bought it for a dollar started general tours in 1996 and opened a museum inside in 2019, five rooms of props and costumes and set pieces. A count published in 2024 put attendance at about 170,000 a year. The walking tour runs an hour and a half; there is also a bus tour at $99 a head, April to November, over-13s only, which takes in ten locations around Mansfield. From Labor Day to 17 November the building is given over to a haunted attraction and the ordinary tours stop. Doors are open 11am to 4pm, seven days a week from 1 April to 31 October, and Thursday to Monday the rest of the year.
The state's historical marker stands on the drive. Its last line records that the reformatory was considered substandard by the 1970s, that it closed in 1990, and that it has served since as a setting for several major motion pictures. Outside the walls is a cemetery for men who died inside and whose bodies nobody claimed; their graves carry serial numbers instead of names. Tim Robbins talked about it to a reporter on the set in 1993. No account gives its position or says whether a visitor can reach it.
The cellblock was made of wood
The former Westinghouse Electric plant, East Fourth Street, Mansfield
Terence Marsh wanted the cells facing each other, which the real building does not do, so the tiers were built from scratch: four storeys of wood, fibreglass and plastic, put up inside a Westinghouse building that had shut down along with the rest of the plant. Construction coordinator Sebastian Milito told the local paper in July 1993 that it was not a typical set, that the floors were engineered to carry the load of hundreds of men, and that the detailing went down to names on the walls, peeling paint and imitation rust.
Which of the plant's buildings held it is not recorded anywhere. No account names the hall or gives it an address, so the marker here sits on the parcel and not on a door. Two accounts published five months apart in 2011 contradict each other: one has the abandoned factory still standing with the sets long gone, the other says the warehouse used for the film had recently been torn down. Demolition on the site has gone on since, and nothing ties any of the buildings named in those reports to the shoot. The set itself is certainly gone.
One more location belongs here and has no pin. The stream Andy climbs out into after the pipe was real; the sewage was water, chocolate syrup and sawdust, the pipe was a prop, and a chemist certified the actual water toxic, so the crew dammed the stream to deepen it and chlorinated it. No published account names where it is.
Brooks steps off the kerb here on his way to the boarding house and flinches back from a car, under the line about the world having got itself in a big damn hurry. It is a working street corner, 82 m from the Bissman Building, and in the film the two are one continuous move.
Bissman Building, 193 North Main Street
The Bissman Building at 193 North Main Street, Mansfield. Its front is the Brewer Hotel where Brooks lodges, and also the office of the Portland Daily Bugle. Only the outside: Brooks's room is inside the prison.
The front of this brick warehouse is the Brewer Hotel, where Brooks is put up after forty years inside and where he hangs himself, and where Red is given the same room. It also plays the front office of the Portland Daily Bugle, the paper Andy posts the warden's ledger to. Only the outside: the room is back at the prison.
Peter Bissman built it in 1886 for a wholesale grocery business, and people downtown in the early 1930s knew it by smell, coffee blends in the morning and roasting peanuts in the afternoon. The county trail points out how much the front resembles the Reformatory and says the two share an architect and a build year. The years match, since work on the prison began in 1886 as well. No independent source names the Bissman's architect. The building is closed to the public and the movie-site sign is off the wall during street works, so this one is a photograph from the pavement.
The Food-Way, where Brooks and then Red bag groceries under a manager who wants to be asked before anyone uses the toilet. It was the E&B Market when the film shot here and it has been more than one supermarket since, which is why the address is the steady part. It is still a full-service grocery, with Shawshank murals painted inside and out.
Central Park, Mansfield
Central Park in downtown Mansfield, where Brooks feeds the birds. This view shows the Martin Luther King Jr memorial, not the bench; the bench a visitor sits on today is a replica west of the gazebo, and the gazebo stands where the film's bench was.
The same park eighty years before the film: a colourised postcard of Central Park, Mansfield, showing the fountain and the band stand, 1914.
Photo: Unknown; contributed to Commons by Columbus Metropolitan Library · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
Brooks feeds the birds on a bench here, waiting for a crow that does not come. The bench in the film is gone. A gazebo stands on the spot where it was, and the bench people sit on for photographs is a replica a few steps west along the paved walk, with a plaque on it.
That is close to what happened to the bench in Forrest Gump, released the same year: the prop was carried into Chippewa Square in Savannah for the shoot and carried out again, and people still come to the square looking for it.
Mansfield Antiques Gallery, 118 North Main Street
North Main Street in Mansfield's Carrousel District. The antiques shop with the pawn shop window is on this block; the Bissman Building and the crossing where Brooks steps off the kerb are two blocks further north.
Red looks through the window of a pawn shop and sees the compass that sends him to Buxton. The window is on this block of North Main, in the Carrousel District, and the shop behind it sells antiques rather than pledges. It is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm, and Sunday afternoons. The filming claim rests on the county trail alone; no other account names the pawn shop.
Renaissance Theatre, 138 Park Avenue West
The Renaissance Theatre, 138 Park Avenue West, Mansfield — a 1928 movie palace. Nothing was filmed here; this is where the film had its first public showing, in September 1994, before Toronto and before the general release.
Nothing was filmed here. This is a 1928 movie palace where Mansfield saw the picture first, in September 1994, before Toronto and before the limited release on the 23rd of that month. It is a stop on the trail and it is the one stop on the trail that is not a location, which is worth knowing before anyone drives to it looking for a scene.
An hour west
Wyandot County Courthouse, Upper Sandusky
The Wyandot County Courthouse in Upper Sandusky, where Andy is sentenced in the opening minutes. It is a working court; the courtroom is shown to visitors only when it is not sitting.
The opening trial, and the two consecutive life sentences. It is 65 km west of the prison and it is a working county courthouse, which sets the terms of a visit: the building is open on weekdays and the courtroom itself is only available when the court is not sitting, so the trail asks people to phone ahead. The number it gives belongs to a man in the same town.
The Shawshank Woodshop, 226 South Eighth Street, Upper Sandusky
Three hundred and fifty metres from the courthouse, 0.3 miles by road. The prison wood shop is here, which means the scene where the Marriage of Figaro comes over the tannoy and, as Red puts it, every last man at Shawshank felt free, was shot 65 km from Shawshank.
Bill Mullen owns the building and has turned it into a museum you visit by appointment. He has the screen-used vehicles, including Andy's prison bus, and Bogs's wheelchair and ambulance, and he calls the place Shawshank West. He is also the phone number for the courthouse, and in 2011 he was the man explaining to reporters what the ants had done to the inside of the oak tree.
Two doors in Ashland
19 West Main Street, Ashland
Main Street in Ashland, the town nineteen miles from Malabar Farm that supplies two locations: the bank Andy empties and the bus station where Red buys his ticket. This is a general view of the street, not of either building.
Andy in the pinstriped suit, closing out Randall Stephens's accounts and handing the teller a letter for the outgoing mail. The Freer brothers started a private bank in this building in 1874 and it became the Farmers Bank in 1917. By the trail's account of it, the vault door weighs thirteen tons, arrived from Akron behind eight horses, and was slid off the wagon on planks greased with a hundred pounds of bananas; the hinges alone are three tons. The door, the teller line and one of the upstairs offices are in the film.
It is a financial advisory office now, open weekdays, and the trail asks visitors to call before arriving rather than walk in on someone's meeting. Published accounts of the shoot name the town and stop there; for this building the trail is on its own.
Red queues for a ticket and asks for Fort Hancock, Texas. The bus station is a thrift store now, a couple of hundred metres from the bank, open Monday to Saturday.
This one comes with a caveat. The trail has a page for it, but the station does not appear on the trail's own index of filming sites, and nothing else names the building. Whether it was dropped from the route or simply never relisted is not something anyone would tell you on the pavement outside.
Butler, Ohio stands in for Buxton, Maine. Red gets out of the red pickup at this crossroads and starts walking; the shot looks straight down Snyder Road. It is 20 km south of Mansfield, open country. There is nothing here to go into: the location is the crossing and the road running away from it.
The bus going away over the hill, 1.2 miles from the last corner. The trail's advice here is a safety instruction as much as a viewing one: stand on Hagerman Road and look left onto the state route, rather than stopping on the state route itself.
Sandy Point National Wildlife Refuge, St. Croix — the beach that plays Zihuatanejo. The last shot of the film says the Pacific coast of Mexico; the water here is the Caribbean.
The refuge sign after Hurricanes Irma and Maria, October 2017. Sandy Point is a leatherback turtle nesting site and is closed to the public from April to August; from September to March it opens at weekends only.
Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Southeast Region · Public domain (work of the U.S. federal government) · Wikimedia Commons
The last shot of the film, Red walking up the sand towards Andy and the boat, was made 3,300 km from Ohio on the south-western tip of St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The story puts it on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Nothing was shot in Mexico.
The refuge covers 383 acres and holds the longest continuous beach in the Virgin Islands, three quarters of the territory's largest salt pond, a prehistoric archaeological site, and the biggest leatherback turtle nesting ground in the United States. The turtles set the calendar. The beach is closed to the public from April through August for the nesting season, and open from September to March at weekends only, so the ending of the film is on sand nobody can walk onto for five months of the year.
The visitor centre at Malabar Farm State Park. The trail asks visitors to check in here before driving the last 0.4 miles of dirt road to Pugh Cabin, where the film opens.
The film opens here, with Andy sitting in a car outside in the dark with a bottle and a revolver while his wife is inside with Glenn Quentin. The murder he did not commit happens in this cabin.
Jim Pugh built it in the 1940s next door to Louis Bromfield's farm, from logs, with two sandstone fireplaces and a pair of chandeliers that came out of a Mansfield bank. It stands in a state park and costs nothing to see. The trail asks visitors to check in at the Malabar Farm visitor centre first; from there it is 0.4 miles of dirt road, or a mile on foot through the Doris Duke Woods, named for the tobacco heiress who bought the timber rights to that woodlot after Bromfield died in 1956.
Pleasant Valley Road, where the oak stood
The oak in March 2013, photographed from Pleasant Valley Road across the wire fence — the only way anyone was ever allowed to see it. It had already lost half its crown to lightning in 2011. Winds took the rest in July 2016 and the landowner cut down the remains in April 2017.
Eight hundred metres north of the cabin, on the other side of the road from the park, Red counts fence posts along a hayfield, finds the stone wall and digs up the tin. The white oak he does it under was about 100 feet tall and stood alone in the middle of a field, which is why people could see it from the road and why they kept coming.
Lightning hit it on 29 July 2011 and half of it came down. The wood inside turned out to be hollowed by rot and carpenter ants. It stood for five more years on what was left; a storm knocked that down on or about 22 July 2016, and on 9 April 2017 the landowner cut up the remains. The wood was made into rock hammers and magnets, first sold that year at the Shawshank Hustle, a road race named after the film.
The land is private and always was. The owner, a local attorney, put a fence up long before the tree fell, and people drove slowly down Pleasant Valley Road photographing it over the wire; the ones who could not find it walked into the state park gift shop across the road with a puzzled look, which is how the staff there knew what they were about to be asked.
The reprieve at the start of this went to the building. Nothing was ever arranged for the tree. The trail asks people not to stop on the road or climb the fence, and sends them to the pull-off in the field on the Malabar Farm side, which looks across a wire fence at a hayfield and the line of the ridge.
