Colfax City Hall Receives Historic Preservation Award

Colfax City Hall received one of the state’s highest historic preservation honors—the Small Adaptive Re-use Award—at the 2023 Preserve Iowa Summit held earlier this month in Sioux City, Iowa.

In 2018, the City of Colfax purchased a historic downtown building that had been vacant for a decade. The circa 1920, 7,300-square-foot brick building was built as the Everett and Baker Ford Garage and dealership. The plan was to renovate the building into a permanent City Hall, Police Department, and Colfax Main Street Office that was ADA accessible. Because of 13 years of collaboration between the City of Colfax and Colfax Main Street, the historic preservation of this building was a shared goal. The interior of the historic building was cleaned, and its original vaulted roof trusses were cleaned, repaired, and left exposed. Since the building had been gutted, all of the interior plumbing, electrical, walls, and finishes for functional office space had to be installed.

The City of Colfax received the award from the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (IDCA) and Preservation Iowa during the 2023 Preserve Iowa Summit, held in early June at the Warrior Hotel and Orpheum Theatre in Sioux City. The summit, presented annually by the department’s State Historic Preservation Office, is the premier statewide conference for historic preservation. More than 220 architects, developers, historic preservation professionals, government officials, and others attended the three-day event. For more information about the historic preservation awards, visit the IDCA website.