The meeting will be in the Friends Room of the Columbia Public Library. All of CoMo Preservations are free and open to the public. 

Tanner is the general manager of Ott Historic Rehab/Alley A Realty, a firm that has renovated buildings ranging from an old funeral home to a meat packing plant. Tanner will show photographs from the various projects and discuss the ups and downs of historic preservation. 

Alley A’s newest project is bringing back Columbia’s old City Hall/Jail on Ninth Street.

Prior to returning to Columbia in 2014 to join Alley A, Tanner worked in Ely, Minnesota completing nine different historic preservation projects there. His parents, John and Vicki Ott began rehabbing buildings in 2004 and branded their firm Alley A Realty in 2007. The company’s renovations in the North Village Arts District were instrumental in that area.

Alley A’s recent projects have included the Atrium on Tenth, the former Koonse Glass that now houses Acola Coffee and Le Bao in the North Village Arts District, the Diggs Meat Packing building that houses Ozark Mountain Biscuit at 1204 Hinkson Ave., and Pasta La Fata, Party Perfectly and Nail Couture at 1207 Rogers.

At 7 p.m. July 25, Billy Polansky of the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture will discuss the Henry Kirklin legacy and how it is being continued. All of CoMo Preservation’s monthly meetings are free and open to the public. The meeting will be in the Friends Room of the Columbia Public Library.

Billy is the executive director of the Center and has been one of the leaders in the effort to recognize Kirklin’s importance in Columbia’s history.

Kirklin was born into slavery in 1858 and freed five years later. He went on to become a successful businessman, farmer, and educator. As a young adult, he worked as a greenhouse supervisor at MU’s horticulture department. A supervisor noticed his talents and asked Kirklin to teach propagation and pruning to the university students — but because of the racial segregation laws at the time, Kirklin was forbidden to enter MU’s building, leaving him to teach the students outside. He went on to develop a successful business growing fruit, vegetables and plant starts. Kirklin was known to remark he was “the only negro who ever taught at the University of Missouri,” according to https://buildthistown.org/kirklin. This source notes that the assistant secretary of the Missouri Board of Agriculture in 1913 said Kirklin had been “pretty near a teacher, even if his name was not on the faculty directory.” Kirklin died in 1938 at age 80, but until 2020 his grave was unmarked.

7 p.m. June 20: Matt Fetterly, a local historian, will explain the historical forces behind Columbia’s architecture. Learn about the shifting architectural tastes of Columbian, what we share in common with the rest of the nation, and what makes Columbia one of a kind. We’ll take at Federal, Victorian, and Mid-century Modern styles and talk about our historic preservation successes and failures of our past.

An eighth-generation Boone Countian, Matt is an alumnus of Hickman High School and the University of Missouri. He’s accumulated a collection of more than 170 books about Columbia and Boone County. He’s especially interested in Black, indigenous, LGBT and cultural history as well as architecture, music, art, theater, and cemeteries.

Matt is also a professional percussionist and musical theater musician who has worked at the Arrow Rock Lyceum since 2012.

All CoMo Preservation’s monthly meetings feature a guest speaker on historic preservation and/or historic properties in Columbia, Missouri, and are open to the public and held in the Friends Room at the Columbia Public Library.