Alamance County’s commissioners have made history, in a manner of speaking, by officially naming two sites in the southern part of the county as local historic landmarks.
During a meeting last Tuesday, the commissioners unanimously voted to bestow this designation on the Guthrie Mill Dam, which was constructed in Snow Camp during the late 19th Century as an accessory to a long-vanished mill.
The commissioners also assigned this status to the Oak Grove Slave Cemetery, which lies in the Heritage Glen subdivision within the Village of Alamance.
The commissioners ultimately approved these designations based on recommendations from Alamance County’s Historic Properties Commission, which oversees locations of historic significance in unincorporated parts of the county.
In the case of the Guthrie Dam Mill, the historic properties commission had endorsed landmark status due to the dam’s structural “integrity” and its “industrial architecture,” which is characteristic of a style prevalent in the 1870s.
In the meantime, the commission recognized the Oak Grove Slave Cemetery for its own inherent significance and for the “historical impact” of “the descendants of the slaves” that are interred in its grounds. Located along Yorkshire Drive in the Heritage Glen subdivision, this site is the final resting place for about 40 slaves owned by the Holt family.
Matthew Hoagland, the county’s planning director, informed the commissioners that the old slave cemetery is already marked off by a hand-crafted sign that a local scout erected as part of his Eagle project. Hoagland added that the Village of Alamance, which has no historic properties commission of its own, had submitted the application to have this site recognized as a local historic landmark.
The conferment of local landmark status puts both of these sites under the aegis of the county’s historic properties commission. In each case, the property owner will have to obtain a “certificate of appropriateness” from the commission in order to materially alter the protected sites. In return, the property owners can apply for “preferential tax treatment,” effectively halving their property tax obligations for the landmarks.
