Former Boggs' house could be up for sale

Reporter

rseaborn@pickenssentinel.com

PICKENS - The former Boggs' home place, which served for many years as the Pickens Jaycees' haunted house during Halloween, could be up for sale soon, said Rocky Nimmons, former president of the local Jaycees chapter.

During a meeting of the Pickens Downtown Business Association Tuesday, Nimmons told the group that lawyers are researching the proper procedures in selling the property that is located at the edge of Pickens, just off West Main Street.

"We have had one person who looked at the house with the intentions of restoring it, maybe turning it into a bed and breakfast," he said. "He even crawled under the house and said that it was structurally sound and was very restorable."

Money collected by the Jaycees to purchase the building was raised in Pickens, and that group believes that funds resulting from the sale of the house should also remain in Pickens, he said.

Since the local Jaycee chapter is inactive, the state office could stake a claim into the money, Nimmons said.

Former Jaycee members want to sell the property and funnel the proceeds back into the community through donations to special agencies geared toward assisting the city, he said.

"So that's the holdup," he said. "We're just having an attorney review the proper procedures to sell it."

The Boggs House was constructed in the early 1800s and could fall under the National Historical Registry, Nimmons said.

In other action, the group agreed to request that members of the City of Pickens Council consider revamping an ordinance that allows business signs to be placed only at the site of that business. The association is considering the placement of drop signs on the corners of Main Street which would direct customers to parking areas and also give information on which business are located within a certain block.

Each business would be responsible for the purchase of individual signs that would link to each other and hang from a pole located at the corners.

In other discussion, some members of the association expressed concerns over the sharper-angled parking spaces lining the street, saying that the angle of the space made the backing out of a vehicle difficult.

City Administrator Chris Eldridge told the group that the state's Department of Transportation initially wanted the city to create parallel parking spaces, thus eliminating the majority of parking area in the downtown district.

"We just went round and round with the DOT over that," Eldridge said. "And then they wanted us to provide back-in spaces, but that didn't' seem to be a good setup."

Eldridge said that the spaces located along Main Street were deeper angled to keep the back end of the vehicles using the spaces out from the roadway.

To alleviate some of the parking problems in the business district, Eldridge said that business owners could work together in giving the city that property located behind the businesses.

"That property is a mish-mash of ownership," Eldridge said. "All that parking area behind the stores is privately owned."

Eldridge said that by consolidating that property and deeding it to the city, it could be transformed into a quality parking area.

"We could really do something nice with that area," he said. "But you would have to get the cooperation of ten different land owners to make it work."

The association also discussed the impact of local festivals had on business, each agreeing that the amount of foot traffic into a shop during an event depended on the location and nature of the business.