Click here to view the most up-to-date MissPres Collection of Mississippi Preservation Guidelines.
Any Mississippi town with a historic preservation commission that oversees a local historic district very likely has a set of design guidelines. These guidelines offer general design and technical recommendations to assist in applying the Secretary of Interiors Standards to properties. If you own property in an area that has a historic district zoning overlay, in the same way you would apply for a building permit, the permit would receive review and approval from the local historic preservation commission. To the average person these commissions guidelines don’t have to be confusing or burdensome. The creation of these guides is to help property owners plan their project, because a well-preserved building only grows in value and preservation commissions aren’t there to prevent your project, but to keep someone else’s project from lowering your property value.
These guidelines are very helpful, but often times can be difficult to access. A few municipalities have placed their guideline online for the convenience of their citizens, but they often end up buried on a back page of a website. Some of the guidelines funded by MDAH are on the HRI database but again, if you don’t know where to look you won’t find them. The idea of creating this list is to ease the process for property owners and to provide newly formed or existing commissions looking to revise their standards a single stop to view the guidelines of other towns.
After an afternoon of searching these are the online guides I was able to locate:
I have a few hard copy guides that I’d like to scan and upload if our server space will allow. If your hometown has a digital version of a design guideline leave a comment with the link below.
Categories: Biloxi, Books, Building Types, Cleveland, Hattiesburg, Hazlehurst, Historic Preservation, Jackson, Kosciusko, McComb, MDAH, Oxford, Preservation Education, Preservation Law/Local Commissions, Raymond, Renovation Projects
Preservation in Mississippi 
I love the idea of these! I have a really cool one for Dayton, Ohio when I was living there. It’s one of my favorite finds!
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You’ll have to review some of the Mississippi guidelines and let us know how they compare.
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Starkville:
http://www.cityofstarkville.org/DocumentCenter/View/1493
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Thank you for the link! I was certain that Starkville had a guide but I had not been able to find it online.
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I have always believed that Preservation in Mississippi should post historic preservation commission minutes from around the state, as well as MDAH Board of Trustees minutes and/or decisions. The logistics of that, seeing as very little of any of those things are online, is rather daunting as it would require contacting historic preservation commission members or local governments and requesting those records. We all know how “easy” it is for the public to get access to public records. MDAH, repository of Mississippi’s public records, is likewise averse to the public actually reading MDAH’s own records.
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I agree that would be quite daunting, considering that municipalities with the best of intentions and a paid staff often have difficulty posting online any kind of meeting minutes or agendas. But Preservation In Mississippi could be a format to present that information if it was ever offered.
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