Preserving the old Evers farmhouse, creating a garden or a wildlife education center for demonstrations to kids carrots and chickens don’t come from Kroger — all were possibilities discussed by the public last week for the remaining 10 acres of the Evers Farm not being developed into apartments.
Gary Packan, director of Denton Parks and Recreation, and Ziad Kharrat, assistant director of Parks and Recreation, hosted Thursday’s public meeting to solicit input from the public and community leaders on how to move forward with the old Evers farmhouse.
About 30 people attended the Thursday night meeting to discuss the old farmhouse.
“I thought the meeting was the beginning of a really good and frank community discussion for the property,” City Council member Brian Beck said in a Friday email to the Denton Record-Chronicle.
“Staff brought together folks with a history and relationship with the property as well as those who suggested a number of opportunities for educational gardens or farms. I relayed some of council’s previous public comments indicating that council supported the community exploring options. I thought it was a fruitful first step.”
Packan said they will also launch a Discuss Denton webpage to offer the public another opportunity to provide feedback.
What should they do with the 10 acres? Should they save the old Evers farmhouse, possibly turn it into an educational center? How many trees should they cut down from the heavily wooded 10 acres to make a parking lot for it, especially since the rest of the property will be losing many for the apartments?
The developer, JPI from Coppell, was only required to dedicate 2.42 acres for community input, but instead offered 10.2 acres of the property on West Windsor Drive near the Boy Scouts’ Scout Hut.
On the remaining property, JPI plans to build four apartment buildings, four stories in height with about 450 units on the property. Apartment traffic will have access to both North Locust and North Elm streets.
Several who attended Thursday night’s meeting seemed in favor of saving the old Evers farmhouse.
“I would just like to say based on my somewhat limited knowledge from this meeting and a little reading before that, I want to say out loud that I would like, if at all possible, for that house to be preserved,” one resident proclaimed. “I love this idea of a garden and wildlife education center because I can’t think of anything else like it right now. … There are so many in the community that could benefit from that. There are some schools that are very close, within walking distance.
“I know there’s so much involved that decision, but for that house to be preserved for that, for a reason like that, I love that idea. I love all the ideas.”
At the meeting Thursday night, Packan offered what all would be involved with that decision to save the house.
Packan also gave a brief history of the old Evers farmhouse and a snapshot of its condition based on what they discovered walking through it. He said the core of the house was built in the early 1900s as the original homestead for the Evers family, which also owned Evers Hardware, Denton’s first water, light and power company and the first electric plant in Denton.
The property was once 450 acres that the Evers family farmed for pecans. They’d sell the pecans at the Evers Hardware Store, with their best crop producing 70,000 pounds of pecans, according to a Feb. 25, 1958, report by the Record-Chronicle.
Since the early 1900s, Packan said the Evers farmhouse has been expanded twice, though he said the cohesiveness is off.
“There are some great qualities to the house, for sure,” Packan said. “I mean, there’s some amazing wood floors in there, the wraparound porch is awesome. I can imagine what those evenings were like sitting on top of the hill.
“There’s a lot of sentimental value.”
The problem, Packan said, is the cost to make it an acceptable structure for the public to visit, including making it accessible for those with disabilities and offering security. They would need not only to make improvements through renovations but also consider future long-term operations and maintenance of the house.
But the city hasn’t done a structural analysis of the house yet, so they’re not sure how much of an investment is needed.
“There is also the garage,” Packan said. “There’s also the barn, there’s also the other structures that are on the site. Those are all kind of creating this character of a space. That is what the property is revered for, I imagine. It’s not just a house. It’s the aggregate of all that. As you enter from the driveway, you enter into this space. You’re going up this gravel road, and you’re going through the trees and entering into this opening where all these wonderful spaces are.”
But Packan said the city would need to make the road accessible to the public and emergency services. It would need concrete, to be reinforced and expanded wider.
“And so, now we start talking about what are the trees that would be impacted with that, and how are the trees currently contributing to that character of space?” Packan explained. “So there’s a lot of challenges, inherently, with making that a public and publicly accessible building as a private residence. … So there is a lot of cost associated with that, not just a monetary cost, but a cost to what happened to the space that needed to change.”
Packan said if council decides to move forward with preserving the farmhouse, they would probably need more funding via partnerships, for example, from the nonprofit and private sectors.
JPI representatives said that they are currently working on an agreement with Parks and Recreation with the goal to offer around $780,000 worth of improvements to the park area.
Kharrat said the improvements were part of the fees that developers have to pay based on the number of units that it is building in the development.
“Those funds are typically put into a fund for the citywide account based on citywide usage,” Kharrat said. “And so every development pays into a park development fee that is used and distributed according to certain zones of the city. And so the improvements that sometimes happen with development is that sometimes we know exactly what we need in that park — trail system connectivity or develop a playground that we know needs to be built in that area.
“And in those cases, we would work with the developer to use those development fees to reimburse them for those improvements.”
As for developing the parkland, the city could either reimburse the developer for doing it or take the money and find someone else to do it.
The developer plans closing on the property in February.
“We may not make decisions that you like,” Packan told those who gathered on Thursday night. “But we’re trying to make decisions that are considering the entire community and the challenges that we have just operating the city as a whole.”