1882 Maryland School May Be Saved
By Jeesoo Park | Online Only | Mar. 18, 2008
Harford County, Maryland, plans to retain the oldest part of the Bel Air Academy, with its dormer roofs, and tear down its additions.
Credit: Town of Bel Air Archives
Weeks after a Maryland preservation group named an 1882 school to its annual list of endangered places, county leaders have decided to save the building.
Constructed by John F. Lingan and D.J Shanaahan, the first brick school in Harford County, Md., was called Bel Air Academy and Graded school until 1907, when it became just Bel Air High School. Over the next few decades, the building gained several additions and in 1951 became school board offices.
Ever since those offices moved out in 2006, the old building has been vacant and boarded up. This week, the county said it had worked out an agreement to save the oldest section of the school. "The newer additions would be torn down and the building sealed up until a design is ready for reuse," says Harford County Executive David Craig in an e-mail. The board of education will likely use the building, Craig said.
The Board of Education owns the property, which adjoins Bel Air Elementary, a school that has minimal open areas and parking facilities. School Board President Thomas J. Fidler explains that although he doesn't want to necessarily destroy the building, the board had considered using the site for a parking lot and playground for the elementary school's 600 students.
"It is undoubtedly an important historical building, but still, if there is an opportunity to expand Bel Air Elementary's campus, we need to do it for the school community," Fidler says. "We have already said that we need the land the building sits on, but that we did not want to tear the building down."
The school board has offered the building to anyone who wants to salvage or move it, setting aside $425,000 "for the reworking of the site to facilitate growth," Fidler says, "but as of today, no one has acted on that."
Town leaders had discussed reusing the Bel Air Academy as some kind of school. "We preservationists all want to see the building used for an educational purpose, and we've spent a lot of time with the Board of Education on this very issue," says Bel Air Town Administrator Chris Schlehr. "We've had private developers and contractors look at it and want to turn it into office space, condominiums, or incubator spaces for businesses, but this was the first-ever brick school building in the county, and the ideal situation would be to get it back for educational use."
Earlier this month, Preservation Maryland included the school on its annual list of endangered places, which may have helped preservationists' cause, Schlehr says. "It certainly doesn't hurt. I think it may have even helped the County Executive make up his mind to commit to saving the structure."
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Comments
Submitted by Samuel at: March 27, 2008
We need to save our older school structures. We support historic districts. We are www.HistoricNearWestside.com