PHW Pledges to Support the Godfrey Miller Home Repairs

Holiday House Tour
The Godfrey Miller Home and Fellowship Center dressed up for Holiday House Tour 1982. This iconic downtown facade needs your help…

PHW is thrilled to announce we have teamed up with the Godfrey Miller Home and Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church to help retain one of downtown’s iconic historical structures. Earlier this fall we visited the Godfrey Miller Home at 28 South Loudoun Street, at the heart of the Old Town Mall, for a site visit with the new executive director of the Fellowship Center, Jason Gottschalk.

The limestone building, constructed circa 1785, is in need of significant exterior maintenance for safety as well as aesthetic reasons. Repairs are needed primarily on the wooden exterior elements, including the roof rakes, lower roof panels, trim and moldings, 28 shutters, a rear dormer, the front porch, and the front door and transom. Some of the most significant work will be the repair and reglazing of 18 windows, as well as carefully removing lead paint to provide a clean working surface for the repair and repainting of the wooden elements.

The work will be performed by the Durable Restoration Company, which recently completed work on the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church spire on West Boscawen Street. It is expected to cost about $109,000, a significant amount for anyone, and especially so for a nonprofit organization.

Seeing the need, oncoming commencement of the work, and our past successful partnerships with the Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church and the Godfrey Miller Home and Fellowship Center, the PHW Board of Directors voted to pledge $10,000 in support of the project. We also pledged to reach out to our membership and readers to ask you to join us, as you did for the Old Lutheran Church Wall project, to help match our pledge.

Please download and read the Godfrey Miller House letter and pledge form, print the pledge form below, and return it with your donation of any amount to the Godfrey Miller Home & Fellowship Center, 28 South Loudoun St., Winchester, VA 22601, to join us in supporting the restoration of this local landmark building.

Join PHW and help support the exterior work at the Godfrey Miller Home with a donation to their Exterior Preservation Fund.

Is My Property in the Historic District?

The Kent Building Winchester’s local Historic District (HW zoning) is quite large at over 1200 documented structures over approximately 45 city blocks. There is often confusion about what area the local Historic District covers and whether or not a property is subject to any oversight for exterior changes.

All properties within the local Historic District are subject to review by the Winchester Board of Architectural Review for exterior alterations. Refer to Article 14 of the Winchester Zoning Ordinance and the Design Guidelines for the Historic District. For questions and more information about BAR oversight and applications, direct your inquiries to the Winchester Planning and Zoning Department, which acts as the city staff for the BAR.

This may sound very complicated, overwhelming, and impossible for an individual to figure out what the requirements are and where to go for information. There are a few ways you can check the status of your property on your own, quickly and easily, to determine whether you are subject to BAR oversight:

How to Check the Winchester Historic District (HW Zoning) Status

If you are new to the area, you may not realize some of the ways you’ve seen other historic districts and protected properties marked are not the same in Winchester. Here are some ways you may expect to see a historic district marked that are NOT a reliable indicator in Winchester:

How NOT to Check the Winchester Historic District (HW Zoning) Status

  • Historic building plaques (The oval plaques in Winchester are recognition for buildings of significance within the district, but are an optional part of the local historic district and denote no other protections or restrictions.)
  • Street signage (Historic district boundaries are not fully marked by signage and such signs should be used as a guide only.)
  • Real Estate Assessment Search (HW zoning is NOT shown on the web assessment search.)

Do you have any further ideas to add to the list? Perhaps you’ve expected to be able to check local Historic District status in some other way you don’t see listed here. Please drop us a note at PHW and we will keep this post updated.



Images from Helping Homeowners

Work is progressing at our first facade improvement project house, 134 E. Leicester St. PHW started our association with the homeowner several years ago for Day of Caring. We are thrilled that our successful fundraisers this spring enabled us to give back a bit more to this deserving project. Images of the project can be seen at our Facebook page.

PHW is still accepting donations and volunteers for the program. Donations can be made at the PHW website via PayPal or via mail to PHW at 530 Amherst St. Winchester, VA 22601. Persons interested in volunteering, please contact Nancy Murphy at nvmurphy556@gmail.com.