Incentives available to restore historic buildings

    The city of Washington can boast of many historic homes and businesses. What the town?s residents are finding out is that the state and federal governments are willing to help those individuals who wish to rehabilitate historically significant structures. The state and federal governments provide tax credits to developers who refurbish old buildings that were associated with a prominent person or had national or local importance.

    The F.B. Mills Seed Building on North Seventh Street in Washington may be eligible to receive these tax incentives because of the building?s oversized design and its importance to the town?s economy following its construction in 1900. The building was recently declared eligible for the National Register of Historic Places following the submittal of an application to that effect from Rod Scott, the president of the board of directors of Preservation Iowa.

    Being declared eligible to the national register is just Step 1 in a three-step process to obtain state and federal tax credits. Scott said that the second step is to inform the national register about what the building will be used for once it is refurbished and how it will be refurbished. The third step is to have a Historic Preservation official from the state certify that the repairs were completed and that they did not alter historically significant characteristics of the building.

    Mary Patterson, who chairs the City of Washington Historic Preservation Commission, said there are nine buildings in Washington that are on the national register. She mentioned the Conger House, the DAR log cabin in Sunset Park, the Keck House on West Washington Street and also her own home on West Washington. She said there are no buildings in the downtown that are listed on the national register. She said that is not because the downtown buildings are not historically significant but rather because of the enormous amount of research and paperwork required to be admitted to the register.

    Patterson said she has to spend hours and hours searching through records to discover when buildings were built and who owned them.

    ?We start with the Sanborn maps, which were fire insurance maps. The oldest one we have for Washington is 1885, which doesn?t help much with the downtown because most of those buildings were already there,? said Patterson. ?All the Sanborn maps tell you is what the building was made of, how many stories it was, and how many doors and windows there were.?

    The next step is to go to the courthouse and examine the transfer books to see when the land was sold, said Patterson. 

    ?The transfer books only tell you when the land changed hands, and not if there was a building there,? said Patterson. ?Abstracts only tell you about the land, not the building, unless there?s a mortgage recorded. That will tell you that someone mortgaged the property for some reason, and then you look at the amount which might indicate that the owner was building a house.?

Patterson said that she is also able to glean a lot of information from century-old newspapers that are now on microfilm. 

For the full article, see the Jan. 5 print edition of the Washington Evening Journal.