Developers are using historic tax credits to save landmark structures in Hamilton and Middletown’s downtown area, maintaining their historical integrity while bringing them up to 21st century purposes and codes.
But not all efforts are successful, as was the case in Hamilton, which attempted to save many of its older schools before those buildings were ultimately razed.
One of the biggest challenges most organizations face following the recession is having the finances to rehabilitate or purchase a site, said Kathy Creighton, executive director of Butler County Historical Society.
“We used to have a lot of funding … we really haven’t taken on a major project in 10 to 15 years,” Creighton said.
If a building is owned by a bank and it falls to a community’s land bank, there’s not much anyone can do about it, she said.
“Once it gets to the land bank, it’s coming down, pretty much,” Creighton said. “You try and stop it before it gets to that point. If someone owns it privately and they decide to tear it down, about all you can do is get the public outcry behind it and see if you can change public opinion. But if it’s in private hands, there’s not a lot you can do.”
Getting a site on the Ohio Historic Register by showing its historic significance is not a foolproof plan either, she said.
“It doesn’t guarantee anything, it just makes it a little more difficult to do it,” Creighton said. “The Historic Register stops you from making massive changes to the outside or inside that would change the historic integrity of a building.”
In West Chester Twp., an effort was recently launched to stop Lakota Local School District and Boys & Girls Club of West Chester/Liberty from tearing down Union School so the club can build a new $6.5 million facility on the site.
The school’s central section was built in 1916 and opened in 1917, with other wings added in the decades that followed, according to Mary Jo Bicknell, president of the West Chester-Union Twp. Historical Society, one of the people supporting the effort to save the school.
The township’s primarily rural history means most of its historical buildings are either farmhouses, churches or the homes that now make up Olde West Chester’s business district along Cincinnati-Dayton Road, Bicknell said.
In communities like West Chester, which have experienced tremendous population gains in recent decades, it’s a challenge connecting to those whose family history is elsewhere, Bicknell said.
“You try to convey it to them … they start realizing the history that is in this area, they go ‘Oh really? We didn’t know that,’ and it kind of brings them around to realize that these were people’s homes long before they were here,” Bicknell said.
Sam Ashworth, president of the board for the Middletown Historical Society, said he’s witnessed the loss of several key links with Middletown’s past since moving to the city in 1964, including the Roosevelt School on Central Avenue, a building constructed in 1930 and demolished by Middletown City School District in 2010.
“I tried to get enough interest to save the school for some other purpose and obviously failed at that,” he said. “That was one that I felt was a building that was really in a prime location. Although it had some age on it, it could have been repurposed.”
While some efforts succeed in helping save a community landmark — think Sorg Opera House or the Sorg Mansion — others fail to connect with the hearts and minds of those who can help.
While Ashworth said he speaks to people all the time who tell him it’s a shame what’s happening to the city’s history, Middletown and many other cities have gone through the same process several times in their history, much of it due to changing economy or technology.
“We had paper companies here for a while but … they had older technology and older buildings,” Ashworth said. “It wasn’t feasible for the companies that owned them to keep those older buildings with old technology going.”
Communities also face exorbitant costs in saving a building just by keeping it in good shape.
Lois Kingsley, of the Fairfield Historical Society, said the city has lost structures like Symmes Chapel and Milders Inn, but saved historic buildings like Symmes Tavern and Elisha Morgan Mansion at Gilbert Farms Park and a two-story, cross-shaped building along River Road once owned by George Washington Rue, a general in the Union Army during the Civil War.
“We have history in our own backyard and sometimes we’re not aware of it,” Kingsley said.
If a community cannot save a building from being destroyed, it can preserve its memory via photographs and published books, something Fairfield Historical Society continues to do, she said.
Liberty Twp., the community to most recently experience a building boom, has lost its share of buildings in the past several decades, according to Paul Stumpf, the president of the Liberty Twp. Historical Society.
“The majority of architecture that we have lost has been farmsteads, houses, barns, etc.,” he said. “The majority of these have been torn down to make way for housing developments. A few have been replaced by commercial buildings.”
Stumpf said most of the buildings that were torn down likely needed to be, as it would have been too difficult to bring them back up to standards.
Still, not having certain buildings around means not being to look back at a community’s heritage.
“It’s a reminder of our past … and a good lesson to understand how our ancestors had to live,” Stumpf said.
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