Fort Mill has an agreement to sell one of its best-known sites. Here’s the town plan.
An historic public meeting space at the heart of Fort Mill is under contract for sale.
Fort Mill Town Council voted Monday night to authorize the sale of the Spratt Building at 215 Main Street. The ordinance doesn’t complete the sale, but continues the process started by a contract dated Jan. 14.
Davy Broom, town manager, said he couldn’t discuss terms of the agreement Monday night or what type of tenant the new owner might bring. He did say the ordinance approved by council was a necessary step.
“The prospective buyer is expecting to invest a sizeable amount of money into doing their due dilligence on the property itself, to determine if it’s going to meet their needs,” Broom said.
Mayor Guynn Savage acknowledged news of a potential sale could surprise some people in town.
“This may seem surprising to some, because it is a building that’s been here all my life,” she said.
Downtown Fort Mill is vibrant today in a way it wasn’t for many years, Savage said, and the Spratt Building sits at the heart of the Main Street renaissance. Downtown has several new restaurants, shops and other sites that opened the past half dozen years.
“We’re very excited about downtown being a destination again,” Savage said. “We also recognize that the facility didn’t offer the options that we were looking for moving forward as a growing community.”
Selling the Spratt Building would allow the town to put more money to the ongoing transition of the former Banks Street Gym for use as a community center. Savage said she sees the possibility of larger meeting spaces there. Broom noted recent work to improve parking, and coming work to improve lighting at the community center.
A sale of the Spratt Building also could lead to new growth on Main Street that wouldn’t come through town ownership.
“It also adds vitality to the existing energy on Main Street,” Savage said.
The Spratt Building has had numerous uses. It once was a bank. County records show the town took ownership in 2001 from Jane Stacy Spratt. Since then it hosted town council retreats and workshops, historic review board decisions, the earliest presentations on impact fees before the town started them several years back.
The building hosted a 2012 book signing reuniting family descendants of a local policeman and gunwoman who killed him back in 1932. It hosted a “chess wizard” exhibition in 2009.
The Spratt Building is listed on multiple wedding venue sites. A scroll through its Facebook page shows somewhat recent uses for birthday parties, an historic lunch-and-learn, voting system demonstration and baby shower.
The National Registry of Historic Places lists a grouping of historic sites on Main Street as the Fort Mill Downtown Historic District. Certified in 1992, it includes the Spratt Building. Documentation from the registry notes several prior wooden buildings on Main Street destroyed by fire, one in particular burning five stores, a home and post office along Main Street in 1894. A period of masonry construction from 1900 to 1920, it continues, came in response.
By the 1920s “the Main Street area had assumed roughly the appearance” it still has today. The Spratt Building was built circa 1911.
The Spratt Building and others on either side of it represent the development of a commercial core in Fort Mill, according to the register listing. One that started with the first railroad through town in 1852 and accelerated with the incoming textile industry in 1887, along with the population growth it brought.
“The present form and buildings to a large degree represent rebuilding efforts after fires destroyed a large number of earlier buildings,” reads the registry listing. “Thus, the property type represents an association with the broad pattern of the growth and development of the Town of Fort Mill.”
