Sale closes on landmark building

A community reception will be from 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday, April 30, at Mayfield Event Center, the former home of Bollinger County Museum of Natural History.

The Will Mayfield Heritage Foundation recently closed on the sale of this landmark building at 209 Mayfield Drive in Marble Hill to Daniel Polanczyk and Anthony Yates. The community reception will give the public an opportunity to meet the owners and tour the building.

In 2000, the Will Mayfield Heritage Foundation officially began its mission to preserve, collect, archive, maintain and share the history of Will Mayfield College, Bollinger County and the surrounding area.

"Our original goals included the acquisition and preservation of the two surviving buildings of the Will Mayfield College campus," said Eva Dunn, president of Will Mayfield Heritage Foundation. "With the help of our community, the estates of Mary and Lawrence Hahn and of Fred and Emmigean Thomas, the Missouri Economic Development Neighborhood Assistance Program and all our generous donors, we invested over $850,000 to achieve that goal."

Dunn said the foundation's second goal was to return those buildings to public use. The Art and Science Building, which originally contained the Will Mayfield College library, is now home to Bollinger County Library. And Mayfield Hall, the hub of the original campus, will soon enter a new phase of public life under the ownership of Polanczyk and Yates.

"Over the last 178 years, beginning with the Mayfield-Smith Academy which became Will Mayfield College, the subsequent acquisition of the property and establishment of the El Nathan Home, to the last 23 years of the foundation's efforts, there have been many individuals and businesses that have invested time and money on this site because they value the cultural, social and economic health of our community," Dunn said. "While all things inevitably change, we believe the commitment to keep the former Will Mayfield College campus involved in the life of Bollinger County will continue, and we are looking forward to seeing what new history will be made."

The programs of Will Mayfield Heritage Foundation to locate, preserve and share local history will continue through a partnership with Bollinger County Library to exhibit collections acquired by the foundation, to provide access to records, narratives and photographs in the library's Reference and Genealogy Room, and to pursue a program of digitizing these records so they may be shared with a wider audience through hosting on the internet, Dunn said.

The historic legacy the foundation will continue to share includes:

• Collections pertaining to regional history acquired by Bollinger County Museum of Natural History (which is now closed)
• The Will Mayfield Heritage Foundation Archive
• Local and area history of the people, places, institutions and events that shaped the history, including native inhabitants, pioneering families, churches, towns, business, education, arts, music, literature, farming, industry and early exploration
• Missouri prehistory and natural science
• Founding and history of Will Mayfield College
• Trail of Tears routes through Bollinger County
• Civil War in Southeast Missouri