Main Street Greenwood will apply for a grant by the end of February to help cover the costs of a new National Register of Historic Places nomination for downtown Greenwood.
“The goal of the project is to make sure all properties within the historic central commercial building district have been surveyed, and are potentially eligible for preservation tax credits,” Brantley Snipes, executive director of Main Street Greenwood, said in an email.
A team from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History spent the end of last month in Greenwood surveying properties to add onto the existing resource inventory completed in 2015 by the Georgia-based Jaeger Group, Snipes said.
In 2014, she wrote a grant to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) for a historic re-source survey or an inventory of downtown Greenwood.
The awarded match grant was through the Certified Local Government program or the local, state and federal certificates earned through MDAH as a way to help preserve history at all levels of government.
“It is important to note that because we have an active Historic Preservation Commission and people abide by the secretary of interior’s standards for rehabilitation within downtown, we are eligible for grants to do work like this to keep the preservation movement going,” she said.
More than 400 properties within the commercial business district were surveyed within the boundary from Front Street to Johnson Street and Cotton Street to McLemore Street. “They surveyed all over those in 2015 with the intention of doing an updated national registration nomination for downtown Greenwood,” she said.
“Currently there are seven historical districts total interspersed throughout that commercial business district. What that has done is left some properties out of a national register, meaning they are not eligible for tax credits if they were to be restored.”
For Greenwood to be awarded a new grant for 2018, the archives and history team needed to survey 10 more properties on the western boundary of that commercial district that were left out of the 2015 inventory, she said.
The survey team took photographs of each building and filled out description forms that ask for information such as year built and architecture.
After the survey, Snipes said, they will hire a firm to write the national register nomination to the National Park Service, and if it is successful, all of downtown will be considered one historic district.
nContact Lauren Randall at 581-7239 or lrandall@
gwcommonwealth.com.
