West Chester Lions raise money for Heritage Building

WEST CHESTER — The West Chester Lions Club held its 46th annual ice cream social fundraiser Thursday night in the very building they’re raising money for.

West Chester Lions Club President Vicki Erwin said the Heritage Building, originally built as a school, now repurposed as a community venue, was in desperate need of repairs.

“We will discuss it once we have the money for it, but we think we’re going to donate it to the heritage building that’s here in town,” she said. “The building is over a hundred years old. It needs a roof. It needs some help. We think we’re going to help with that organization.”

Erwin said the deterioration was limited to the upper floors, leaving the gymnasium — which had an air conditioner installed last year — a suitable rental venue.

The building, owned by the city and managed by the West Chester Heritage Association, is a longstanding landmark. Formerly a K-12 public school, it became an elementary school in the 1960s when Mid-Prairie’s completion pulled away older classes. When Mid-Prairie took in the town’s elementary students in the 1980s, the building was sold to the city.

“It’s got a museum in it, a museum for the city and a museum for the school,” she said. “They rent out the gym, a meeting room, and a very nice kitchen for reunions, they rent them out for Christmas, but this last year there were not a lot of people gathering, so they did not get a lot of business.”

West Chester City Clerk Sue Janecek said the repairs would be expensive but hopefully reduced by a contractor in the area.

“The original plan we talked about and investigated was doing a pitched roof, and then fixing some of that brick stuff,” she said. “That’s $100,000, but there’s a local contractor that has looked at it, and he thinks he can fix this old roof we currently have. Our problem with the old roof was it had a lifetime guarantee, but the company went out of business.”

Janecek said the city hoped to pool enough money with the Heritage Association to get a price-matching grant from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation, a non-profit affiliate of the Riverside Casino and Golf Resort.

“They’re doing as much as they can to get some funds so we can hopefully go to the casino next spring,” she said. “They typically did it twice a year, but now, since COVID, they’re doing it once a year.”