The continued saga of preserving history

The fight to save this historic house goes on. We have a small but dedicated committee of folks meeting weekly to work on trying to save the Historic 1858 vintage Wells-Sherman House in Kent, Ohio. For weeks we've tried to identify a place where this house can be moved and put to an adaptive reuse that will serve the city and the university, but so far, our work has come up short. Seems that every site we fall in love with turns out to be off limits for reasons as varied as owners, future development, utilities and more. Living as we are in a city where nearly every patch of green is built on, we are rapidly running out of options. A few possibilities remain but I am becoming concerned that we will find these to be unavailable or way out of our financial ballpark, as in, we have no money. All hope isn't lost, though, and the wheels are still turning toward trying to find a place where this house may be moved. People are working behind the scenes with The Powers That Be to try to persuade them to allow us to use some of the sites we've identified as being of good potential. Fortunately the house isn't really that big and would not take up too big of a footprint, so we don't really need that big of a place to move it. The biggest obstacles are time and money. We have a generous pledge from the university to help us pay for the move as mentioned before, but if we should need to purchase land in order to move the house, that could be a problem and we'll need to figure out a way to do some quick fundraising. So for now, the house remains threatened as we work to find it a new home on various sites known to us that we like due to different aspects of each one. I'm hoping that we will know more very soon as things are put in motion by various people who are doing everything they can to secure a new home for this wonderfully historic old house. I'm trying very hard to be optimistic that we'll ultimately be successful in saving the house, but there are days that my optimism wanes and I become panicky about the many uncertainties we still face, like what its future use will be, for example. Still, the publicity we've received in the media has helped just a bit and I am very much hoping that a new exhibit at our local Historical Society on lost historic buildings and homes in our city will spur people to action to help us save one of the last homes of its kind in Kent. All we can do is to hope and pray that those who need to sign off on this project will do so and with haste so that we can move forward with saving and preserving this old treasure. So now, it's just a matter of wait and see whether the people who must make decisions about such things will do so in our favor. I hope we'll know something soon before the backhoes show up and start demolishing the remaining houses on the street where this home stands. The saga continues. Stay tuned.......