Amid ongoing controversy over plans that have been scuttled — for now at least — to take more than 10 acres of land in the Promised Land community from a Black family that has owned it for more than a century, a county official has said work is advancing on the restoration of a home tied to those properties.
Gwinnett County Project Administration Division Director Glenn Boorman gave an update about efforts to the restore the Maguire-Livsey House, also known as “The Big House,” to the Gwinnett Historical Restoration and Preservation Board this past week. Work on a design scope for the restoration project began in 2022.
“Last summer, we engaged with historical architect Lord Aeck Sargent to begin putting together a design scope for the restoration process,” Boorman said. “We actually got that approved, that contract approved, by the Board of Commissioners in December of last year and their contract was officially executed in the middle of February.
“Since that time, we have been meeting internally with Lord Aeck Sargent to begin the planning and outreach process and what that will look like going forward.”
The idea, according to Boorman, is that public input and outreach to the family will be solicited about what should be done with the house before restoration work begins. He did not say when that input would be solicited, however.
“We don’t yet have a timeline for how that process will be but we’ve been meeting every two weeks to begin that to determine what the restoration and outreach (will look like) and how we are going to proceed, ” Boorman said.
The house predates the Civil War and is steeped in the history of two families.
One of those families is the Maguires, a white family which owned the land and ran it as a plantation before and during the Civil War, and still held the land in the years immediately following the war.
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