Reclaiming the Fairmont Armory: What Actually Happened When a Town Decided to Use Its Old Building
I spent about three weeks trying to understand how the Marion County Armory in Fairmont, West Virginia went from a mostly vacant National Guard facility to something people actually talk about now. The short version is that it took a specific group of locals, some city infrastructure money, and a lot of patience with state Historic Preservation Office reviews. The long version is worth reading if you are dealing with a similar building in your own town. The armory was built in the 1920s as a typical Georgian Revival National Guard armory. Big brick building, high ceilings, parade ground floor, small offices upstairs. It sat there for decades doing basically nothing after the Guard unit moved out or downsized. Fairmont, like a lot of smaller West Virginia cities, had a vacant downtown building that everybody knew about but nobody knew what to do with. The shift happened around 2018-2019 when local planners realized the building was structurally sound enough to save and the city was sitting on some FEMA community resilience grants after years of flood damage in the area. That was the key connection. The federal government had money specifically for buildings that could serve as emergency shelters and coordination centers, and this old armory had the square footage and location to qualify.
I ran into the paperwork headache myself when I was helping a consultant map out similar projects for the region. The biggest bottleneck is always the Section 106 review process. You have to document the historic significance, which is straightforward for an armory since they are nationally recognized building types. Then you have to show how the new use will not destroy the character-defining features. The parade floor has to stay open. The exterior brick cannot be covered. Those are non-negotiable points that slow everything down by months. The workaround I ended up using was to bring the State Historic Preservation Office into the conversation early, before the design was finalized. A lot of projects fail because they submit a plan and then get told to change half of it. If you take the preservationist out to walk the building first, they can tell you what they actually care about. For the Fairmont armory, the main concern was the original window openings and the interior staircase layout. Once those were locked in, the rest of the retrofit went much smoother.
How the Building Actually Functions Now
The ground floor serves as a multi-purpose event space and emergency operations center. There is a kitchen area, portable restrooms, and enough power outlets for communication equipment. The upper floors house a few small office spaces and storage. It is not luxurious, but it works for its purpose. The community resilience angle came from linking the building to the city emergency management system. When floods hit, which they do regularly in this part of West Virginia, the armory becomes a staging area for response teams and a distribution point for supplies. Outside of emergencies, it hosts farmers markets, job fairs, and town meetings. The dual use is what justified the federal funding in the first place. One thing people miss about this model is that it requires ongoing staffing. A building by itself does not make a community resilient. Fairmont assigned a part-time coordinator role to manage scheduling and basic maintenance. Without that, the space would have gone right back to being underutilized. I have seen that happen in at least three other towns in the region, and it is the most common failure point for these kinds of projects.
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What You Would Need to Replicate This
If you are looking at a similar situation, here is the practical sequence. First, confirm the building qualifies for historic status. Most armories do, but you need the actual documentation from the National Register or a state-level equivalent. Second, secure a structural assessment. Many of these buildings have foundation issues or roof problems that can blow a budget before anything else becomes clear. Third, identify the grant programs that match your goals. FEMA BRIC and HUD Community Development Block Grants are the main ones for resilience-focused rebuilds. The application cycle for FEMA BRIC opens once a year and the backlog can stretch review times to six months or more. I should note that this approach does not work for every building. If the structure has significant asbestos or lead paint beyond what abatement budgets can handle, the costs can exceed the value of the project. In those cases, partial restoration with a new annex built alongside sometimes makes more financial sense. I worked on a project in a neighboring county where we recommended that exact path because the original building had severe water damage in the basement that made full restoration uneconomical. The Marion County Armory succeeded because the city had a clear use in mind before they started pulling together funding. That clarity made the applications stronger and kept the project on track when funding cycles got tight. Empty historic buildings become problems again the moment someone stops thinking about them. Fairmont kept thinking about theirs, and that made the difference.
