Young County Jail study gets first-round okay

The Young County Historical Commission won first-round approval from state historians for a grant to study how to preserve the 1921 jail in Graham town center, said Susan Smith, president of the Young County Historical Commission.

Smith brought the news to Young County Commissioners at the May 23 meeting and a request to approve a state historical marker for the site. The commissioners voted, 3-2, to allow the historians to proceed with the application for the marker.

Precinct 4 Commissioner Jimmy Wiley, who voted against the grant and historical marker applications along with Precinct 1 Commissioner Stacy Creswell, said the historic designation saddles taxpayers with the unneeded expense and could kill interest from future buyers who may want to convert the Old Jail into hotel accommodations or other uses.

“That limits what can be done,” Wiley said. “I didn’t want to tie our taxpaying citizens to something they don’t need to be tied to. You don’t need to be tied to the Texas Historical Commission. Anybody who has ever has had any dealings with them will tell you that. You don’t someone else telling you what to do or what not to do with your property.”

Wiley said he thinks a private citizen should own the Old Jail. “It’s just sitting over there costing us money,” he said.

The historical designation for the Old Jail constitutes a contract between the county and the state, and it should have been properly noticed as such in the agenda, Wiley said.

“You just signed over your rights to the Texas Historical Commission to let them do whatever they want with that building,” he said. “It’s like a perpetual easement; you’ve got a piece of property that you own but somebody else is going to tell you what you can and can’t do with that property.”

Wiley also noted that the county historical commission must raise $40,000 and use it on state-approved expenditures before the local agency receives the grant. “It’s not worth putting money into it,” he said. “People think I don’t care anything about history, and that’s not true. That building has used its purpose up, and there comes a time that it has to be repurposed.”

The county historical commission had to vie with Graham city leaders, who wanted to tear down the building to make way for an outdoor pavilion - a use that Wiley said made more sense.

“The pavilion would be excellent to have during the food truck festival … that old building is nothing but an eyesore on our square,” Wiley said.

The jail project will go through the second round of scrutiny later this year as it competes for a $20,000 grant that will be used to evaluate the 101-year-old building and create a master plan to update it for a new use.

Smith said that the commission must submit its second-round proposal by July 13, and is busy con-tacting architects and securing funds to match the $20,000 grant.

“We are also gathering letters of support from people saying this is a project we care about and the money will be well spent,” she said.

The state added the jail to a list of the most endangered historic buildings December 2021, after which the Texas Historical Commission informed the county of the opportunity to apply for a grant, Smith said.

“We decided we would fight the good fight. We decided we were going to stand up and a lot of people stood up with us,” Smith said.