Jackson County is known for its small-town charm and early contributions as an iron town. When the Great Depression struck the county, former President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration, through the New Deal, provided grants to the city, a portion of which funded the construction of the historic Memorial Building.
On Dec. 23, 2025, the 90-year-old building located at 145 Broadway Street, was torn down due to aging infrastructure.
The building’s original construction cost $25,000, which today is close to $587,000. The City of Jackson and the American Legion contributed additional funds for the WPA to construct the Memorial Building for both city and legion offices.
“The construction utilized unemployed skilled laborers, and local materials were used to keep costs down,” according to the Lillian E. Jones Museum, where over 140 years of Jackson County history is stored.
In 1903, the Memorial Building was the proposed site of the Carnegie Library. Industrialist and Steel Baron Andrew Carnegie offered $10,000 for construction, but the project fell through when Carnegie’s terms were not met.
The Memorial Building was constructed in 1936 to be a gymnasium for community use. The WPA assisted in its development.
The Service Committee of the Jackson City Council met on June 23, 2025, and discussed the Memorial Building renovation project.
Mayor Randy Evans said the former city administration had completed a “feasibility study” 11 years before to assess the structure’s potential for restoration. However, the city didn’t have the proper funding to make structural changes at the time.
Traci Plants, lead project manager and executive assistant to Evans, said the city was aware of the problems within the Memorial Building, which struggled to meet health and safety codes.
“It was very inaccessible currently [in] its state, and as the city, that was really our first goal when we set out on this project, was to more or less save and make [the building] useful again,” Plants says.
In Sept. 2024, Ohio House Representative Jason Stephens met with public officials in Jackson County and allocated $2.5 million to demolish the building. Ryan Peters, chair of the service committee, expressed his view on the plans for the site.
“If we can’t save the building, then it is good to try to make it look the same,” he says, according to the service committee meeting minutes.
Jackson County’s new City Hall building will be constructed on the same site as the previous Memorial Building. Contractors plan to reuse some of the limestone from it in the construction of the new building.
Plants noted the City Hall is expected to stand for several generations.
“It’s safe, it’s accessible, it’s up to code, but yet, by incorporating the limestone on the front of it, we’re really able to kind of, give a nod to the past and keep a little bit of that heritage of the WPA project of how it did first start,” Plants says.
Ashley Aldrich, director of the Lillian E. Jones History Museum, said Jackson residents have expressed sadness, nostalgia and frustration to see the loss of the historic building.
“For pretty much everyone who has lived here since it was built, they had all been in the (Memorial Building) for something,” Aldrich says. “You play basketball there, you pay your utility bill there. It was really a community fixture.”
Aldrich says the museum was able to attain one of the yellow limestone bricks. She noted the architectural style for government buildings was popular in the 1930s.
She was able to go inside the Memorial Building before its demolition to capture photos of the architectural details like tile and wood flooring.
“I was really lucky, and [am] lucky to have such a good relationship with the city officials, and so they let me go in with a camera, [to] basically photograph every square inch of the building,” Aldrich says.
The City of Jackson will be able to move into the new City Hall building on the same site as the previous Memorial Building, should the project be on time, in April 2027.
Find us on Social Media