The Lee Middle School property on Military Road is now a Mississippi Historic Landmark.
The Mississippi Department of Archives and History designated the site a historic landmark in a unanimous vote early Tuesday, according to a press release from the Columbus Redevelopment Authority, which is marketing the property on behalf of Columbus Municipal School District. The designation requires the site be protected according to the state antiquities law and limits the ways the building, built in the 1950s, may be renovated during redevelopment.
It also allows any developer to claim up to a 45 percent historic preservation tax credit on money spent during rehabilitation, the press release said.
The designation takes the former Lee Middle School one step closer to redevelopment by a potential buyer who has been examining the property since November with the hopes of renovating it into mixture of residential and commercial property. Last week, the Columbus Planning Commission and the Columbus City Council voted to rezone the property from single-family residential (R-1) to neighborhood commercial (C-1) to allow for those changes.
“This is spectacular news,” CRA chairman John Acker said in the press release. “We have a developer that said these two actions were needed to get historic preservation tax credits for costs of rehabilitation and we have done that. This is not a done deal yet, but we are much closer than ever before.”
CRA has not identified the potential buyer except to call it a development group with ties to Lee Middle School and the community. The development group purchased an option on the property in November and has until June 30 to exercise that option and purchase the site.
A high school when it was first built, the Lee school housed white students in the final years of segregation in Columbus. MDAH was purportedly considering that building, as well as buildings at Hunt High School, which held black students, as historic landmarks for the roles they played during segregation.
“(The designation is) significant because of the age of the building and it’s significant because of desegregation and integration,” said Nancy Carpenter, executive director of the Columbus-Lowndes Convention and Visitors Bureau and who sits on the MDAH board.
She added that Hunt High School has not been designated as a historic landmark but that it is “on the board’s radar.”
“It will probably be considered at a later time,” she said. “We … only considered Lee High School (Tuesday).”
Following desegregation, Lee High later became Lee Middle School. It closed in 2011 when Columbus Middle School opened. The buildings on the site currently have asbestos, but Acker previously told The Dispatch the developer could take advantage of state reimbursements given to developers who clean up asbestos-filled properties.
The CRA purchased a $1 option on the property from Columbus Municipal School District in July 2016 and renewed it in 2017, which allowed the board to market the property. The asking price for the property is $1.79 million.
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