A labor of love

For some months now, I have updated you all on the efforts that some of us have been putting forth to save the 1858 Wells-Sherman House in my hometown. It's hit a recent snag with having been turned down by the Planning Commission who voted to reject our plan not based on anything other than the emotional pleas of a bunch of folks who have been using the vacant plot of land where we plan to move the house as a sort of impromptu park by the kind graces of the owner. At the last Planning Commission meeting, they had a bunch of kids put on a play and that was the basis of their vote, that the other side "put on a better presentation" than our side did. That is not their job to make that kind of judgement call. It is their job to rule on a site plan that had already been cleared for acceptable use by the Board of Zoning Appeals. That they failed to do their jobs means that our hopes for a single move of the house to a new site have been dashed and now it looks as if the house will have to be moved not once, not twice, but three times, which could render a lot of damage to this 154 year old home. Today the house was put up on blocks to be moved in a few days to a site that is not yet ready to accept the house and wasn't scheduled to be for some weeks yet. But if the plan is to move the house Thursday, I don't know where they are going to put it, but apparently they are going to have to move it somewhere until our temporary site is ready to accept the house. Then it will have to sit there until December, then we have to hope that we can move it a third time to a permanent location, wherever that may be. Each of those moves is going to cost us upwards of $15,000+ and the university has said they will pay up to $40,000 to move the house, but nobody anticipated that the house would need to be moved THREE TIMES. This does not make me very happy and I am also concerned that they demolished a newer addition to the house this morning and left the back of the house open to the elements and to vermin. I'm not at all happy with the way this is being handled. That the house will move out of harm's way makes me very happy, but I don't like how this is being done and it seems as if we're being pressured by the University to move up our timeframe before we're ready. I don't know what is going to happen because the members of the new non-profit group we formed to save the house, Kent Wells Sherman, Inc. are vacationing this month, myself included. I just returned from vacation but I am leaving again in a few days for another out of town trip, so without any way of meeting to hash things out, I haven't got a clue what is going to happen. Last week I had access to wi-fi and could daily check e-mail, but this next week I will be out of range of such things and will only be accessible by cell phone, and even then, I will only be able to turn it on once a day for messages since I can't really charge it more than a few times during my time camping. So I will be out of range of modern technological devices for the most part for the next week or so. I'll have to make the daily phone call back home to check on how things are going, I suppose. All I can hope for is that it won't take as long as expected for us to get the house to its new permanent home once we clear a bunch of administrative hurdles and are clear to move to our intended site. Stay tuned, the long journey to save a historic landmark continues..................