York Culture & Heritage Museums

The McCelvey Center is a historic school building located within the National Register Historic District in York, South Carolina whose mission   is to collect and preserve the cultural heritage of York County and the Carolina Piedmont while providing programs and educational opportunities that reflect the regional history through research, exhibitions, and performing arts. Many of the school’s former classrooms serve as archival and museum collections storage for the Culture & Heritage Museums with the 1920s auditorium providing a venue for performing arts. Remarkably, the McCelvey Center retains nearly all of its historic, wood sash windows dating to1902 and 1922. Unfortunately, the windows had suffered from years of deferred maintenance which many thought to be close to failure.

Ruling out replacement, the Culture & Heritage Museums decided

to preserve the windows as an important character-defining feature of the building in keeping with Culture & Heritage Museums’ mission as a heritage institution and the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Rehabilitation of Historic Buildings. Work to restore the windows began in September 2019. Each window sash was removed and restored offsite. Lead paint and old glazing were removed. Original glass was reused wherever possible and any wooden elements that had to be replaced were faithfully reproduced.

The project took one year to complete, an impressive timeline considering, over 570 individual window sash and 2,350 individual glass lights were removed and reinstalled or replaced. All 146 window frames were also restored and repainted. This project serves as a prime example of how historic wood windows can be restored rather than replaced to preserve the character of a building, and in turn help preserve the character of the historic community around it.