Meeting will discuss future of Mumford House

URBANA – Discussions of what to do with Mumford House, the oldest building on the University of Illinois campus, resume next week with a daylong public planning meeting headed by architects and engineers who recently evaluated the small frame structure.

The 139-year-old building, originally used as a model farmhouse and the home of early deans of the UI College of Agriculture, was to have been moved to the university's South Farms until the UI Board of Trustees intervened last March. The trustees voted to keep the building where it has been since 1870, just off Lorado Taft Drive near the McFarland Memorial Bell Tower on the UI's South Quad.

The campus historic preservation office will host a "community charrette," beginning at 9 a.m. Tuesday in the Monsanto Room of the ACES Library, 1101 S. Goodwin Ave., U, to discuss possible uses for the building. (A charrette – pronounced "shuh-RET" – is an intensive effort to complete an architectural design project before a deadline, according to Dictionary.com.) The official notice for the meeting says that "(o)nly individuals with serious proposals, including potential cost implications and viable sources of funding, will be considered."

"Quite frankly we don't want blue-sky ideas, 'Let's do this, Let's do that,' without any real solid notion of what it can be used for, and where they're going to come up with the money," said Melvyn Skvarla, the campus historic preservation officer.

Last year, the College of ACES had committed to moving Mumford House to south of Windsor Road and west of Race Street and making it part of a proposed interpretive center. The college also had agreed to raise up to $2 million to move, restore and renovate the building.

"When we were going to move it to south of Windsor, for ACES to go out and restore it, they were going to have to raise $2 million," Skvarla said. "To keep it in place and do everything that is needed, in my personal opinion, is not going to take much less than that. I may be wrong, but I've been in this business for a long time."

But the leader of a local preservation group said the UI's planning process is backward.

"How are we supposed to make a proposal if we don't know what the problems with the buildings are?" said Karen Kummer, executive director of the Preservation and Conservation Association of Champaign County. "It's like the deck is stacked already."

Although the full report – which cost more than $100,000 – won't be revealed until the meeting Tuesday, architects and engineers found a number of problems with the structure, according to Skvarla.

Termites have eaten away at the "sill plate and other structural members where the house meets the brick foundation," he said. The foundation itself "is in bad condition."

"And it appears that at some point the house was struck by lightning because up in the attic there is evidence of fire char," Skvarla said. "You can see in the basement where there's been additional shoring to the existing structure of the house. I guess that shoring could be kept in place, but it would occupy space and limit the amount of free space you have in the basement."

The first and second floors "slope in several different directions," he said, and there's no room to install an interior elevator to make the building handicapped-accessible.

"Hopefully people will present ideas as to what it can be used for," Skvarla said. "When Facilities and Services went in in 1998, we put out a (request for proposals) soliciting proposals to make it a coffee house and nobody was interested, none of the chains were interested at the time because there would be limited clientele at that location, especially in the evenings."

Kummer, of the local preservation group, said at least one proposal for Mumford House, using it for a campus office of sustainable programs, will be presented Tuesday. "I'm hoping there will be others," she said.

She complained that there has been little publicity about the meeting – there isn't even a notice at the Mumford House – and that a special chancellor's advisory committee on Mumford House, of which she is a member, has met only once.

"We're meeting again at 8 a.m. Tuesday, an hour before the charrette," she noted. "We had hoped to have some input on the charrette and some of the other things with the process. It's business as usual over there."

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