Kids & Family

Historical Markers Soon to be Spotted on Five Downtown Plymouth Buildings

The Plymouth Preservation Network received permission from the Historic District Commission to install the plaques last week.

Five historically significant buildings in downtown Plymouth will soon be commemorated with specialized plaques after more than a year of hard work from the Plymouth Preservation Network (PPN). 

The PPN received approval from the Historic District Commission to install the plaques on the outside of four of the five buildings. The first four will go to the Plymouth United Savings Bank (Greek Islands Coney Island), the Connor Building (Kilwins), the Penniman Buildings (336 Main), and the Michigan Bell Telephone building on Ann Arbor Trail.

The fifth marker will go to the downtown Plymouth Post Office, but it has been delayed due to the change in ownership of the building. The text of the marker needs to be redone, according to PPN Chairperson Wendy Harless.

"The part that takes the most time is the research and finding the photographs and everything," Harless said. "Our biggest hurdle turned out to be getting permission from the Historic District Commission to put these signs up and we finally got that last Wednesday."

Harless said the PPN took on the project as part of its mission to educate people about local history.

"There's a lot of beautiful, historical buildings in Plymouth," she said. 

Harless said the buildings were chosen by PPN members who considered which buildings were both architecturally and historically significant. The group narrowed it down to the current five. 

The plaques will be 10 inches by 15 inches and will feature a photo with a short text block underneath.

"There's so much history that we wanted to put in, but we tried to keep it short," Harless said. "And I think maybe we'll put more of it on our website so people can get more in depth. But each one has a picture and then a very short text block underneath it just to give people the important dates and names."

The plaques are being custom made by Graphic Visions in Northville. Harless said she doesn't know how long they will take to be installed, but she just sent in the final PDF files. 

As an all-volunteer nonprofit group, PPN funded the project through donations. 

PPN received $1,000 from Community Financial Credit Union through their Summer of Sharing program. Nico & Vali also donated a good amount of money through their Pay if Forward promotion last summer. 

In addition, the PPN used donations it had received last year to save the Daisy Wall since that project did not go through.

Harless said the PPN would like to make this an ongoing project. 

"Like I said, there's a lot of historical buildings in Plymouth and I think that people just don't know the history or the background of how that building came to be. So I think maybe later this fall we will try to select some other buildings and find funding to do other plaques."

If anybody wants to nominate a building for a historical plaque, send a message to the PPN on their Facebook page


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