Excerpt from the Frederick News-Post:
Plans to build a new neighborhood on a historic farm in west Frederick are progressing, but at a slower pace than originally anticipated.
If things go well, developer FredRock Partners hopes to break ground on a 220-home development at Conley Farm in 2017, according to Victor White, project manager. White told The Frederick News-Post last year that he expected construction to begin in 2016.
The delay comes in part from about six months of discussions and public hearings before the city Historic Preservation Commission. Project plans called for a series of changes, including demolition and relocation, of some historic features and buildings on the 19th-century farm.
The most significant of those, to relocate a 19th-century mill house from the eastern edge of the property to a nearby pathway, received the necessary HPC approval on Thursday. The unanimous vote marked the end to elements of the HPC’s involvement in the proposal.
The 32-acre farm between Baughman’s Lane and Bel Aire Lane is home to nearly two dozen historic structures, tributes to the land’s history in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Frederick Board of Aldermen in 2014 voted to place two separate historic preservation overlays on 14 of the historic structures, making any exterior renovations to those structures subject to historic preservation guidelines.
The mill house approved for relocation had previously been marked with a separate overlay.
With the last piece of the preservation puzzle in place, the remaining project details will go before the city Planning Commission.
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As proposed, the developer will preserve the site’s historic structures with a technique known as mothballing, intended to prevent long-term deterioration. Historic preservationists have heralded the remaining architecture from the farm, which is more than 200 years old, as a rare example of the city’s agricultural past.
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