Despite the mechanical problems, flaking paint and cramped spaces, preservationists would like to see the Lauderdale County Courthouse rehabilitated and kept in downtown Meridian to maintain the historical significance of the aging building.

The Lauderdale County Board of Supervisors asked for guidance on the courthouse from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and invited its representatives to tour the Lauderdale County Courthouse and Ulmer Building Friday.

“The building is not big enough for the present needs of Lauderdale County,” Wayman Newell, the Lauderdale County District 2 representative, warned the three-person group.

Katie Blount, the director of MDAH; Jim Woodrick, the director of the Historical Preservation Committee; and Kane Ditto, the chairman of the MDAH board, toured the courthouse and the Ulmer Building with a group of county representatives. 

Donna Jill Johnson, the county’s circuit clerk, led most of the tour, guiding the group through cramped offices, into deteriorating courtrooms and past winding staircases. 

Johnson told the group that the courthouse had no hot water and that each morning a maintenance worker had to clean up the previous night’s falling plaster in the Circuit Courtroom on the second floor. 

The tour continued past the three floors open to the public and onto the fourth, fifth and sixth floors, all 1939 additions to the 1905 courthouse. The fifth and sixth floors are inaccessible by elevator. These three floors acted as a jail and include a kitchen and medical center, housing more than 200 inmates until it closed in 1998.

“Back then it was a solution,” Josh Todd, the supervisors’ president and District 3 representative, told the MDAH visitors. “Now it’s a problem.”

Much of the leaking and water problems can be traced to these floors, though the supervisors recently paid to replace the roof. The county closed those top floors in 1998 after a Department of Justice lawsuit over the cramped spaces.

Another primary concern of supervisors was the Ulmer Building, at 1906 5th Street, across from the Lauderdale County Detention Facility. The Ulmer Building, on the National Historic District Registry, used to house maintenance for the county but had to be abandoned three years ago.

Now, with the second floor caving in, supervisors asked the visitors if the building could still be structurally sound, as found in a 2013 study.

The visitors seemed to support renovating and preserving the current courthouse as well as the Ulmer Building, if possible.

“There are a lot of challenges and a lot of needs but there is a lot of history, too,” Blount said. “There’s a lot of history in Meridian, in general… it’s evidence of this community’s commitment to protecting historical places.”

That said, the group favored “adaptive reuse” of historic places to maintain functionality, said Woodrick, also a Meridian native. 

Woodrick discussed the supervisors’ past requests to demolish the Ulmer Building, which was denied most recently in 2013 when the study found that it was still structurally sound. Now, however, Woodrick said the case could be different. 

Todd said updating the building would cost significantly more than demolishing it, especially because the grade of the floor would need to be raised to match the grade of 5th Street in order to avoid flooding. 

Ditto provided the supervisors with several studies about the benefits of keeping the courthouse in its downtown location. 

“When it was built, Meridian was larger than Jackson,” Ditto said. “Meridian, in my opinion, has a better downtown and a better fabric than Jackson.”

When built, Ditto said Jackson had only 8,000 residents to Meridian’s 14,000.

“(Downtown) is what people look at when they come to establish a business or consider moving here,” Ditto said. “Courthouses in downtown anchor the entire community.”

Moving the courthouse, Ditto said, reduced the traffic and energy in downtown areas, according to some studies.

The visitors couldn’t make many recommendations on how to fund the courthouse plans, but mentioned the availability of a possible Community Heritage Preservation grant in the next legislative session. The legislature failed to pass a bond issue this year, unless one is passed during the special session, so the grant won’t have any funding until the next year. 

Even then, the highest amount ever awarded was only $800,000 and most amounts ranging between $400,000 and $500,000, according to Woodrick.

“As part of our mission, we want to see the building saved if at all possible,” Woodrick said.

Next, the MDAH will send its technical preservation architects to review the building and look at more structural aspects. Then the supervisors would need to pay someone to survey the Ulmer Building to determine if it is still structurally sound or could be demolished. 

“I think the day went great,” Todd said, following the departure of the visitors. “We expressed our concerns about the jail and the Ulmer Building and they had a whole lot of ideas.”

Todd said that the board would look at ways to pay for the courthouse without having to raise taxes or tie up all their funding with bonds. 

“Because with a $20 to $30 million bond we’re not just bonding my kids but we’re bonding my grandkids as well,” Todd said. “We’ll put it to a referendum and let the people decide.”

One avenue supervisors might explore is funding through lease purchase agreements, where a private developer would fund the fixes and the county could pay back in increments.

“I believe there’s an economic boon heading for Lauderdale County,” Todd said. “So we need to have our finances in order.”