I grew up in a town in Ohio where the famous abolitionist John Brown (hanged in 1859 after his abortive raid on Harpers Ferry) had built a tannery in the 1840s 1835 that was still standing in 1976. To celebrate the bicentennial, the city council had it condemned and torn down, to make way for … a parking lot. Hilariously, the council claimed it was a danger because it was about to collapse, but it took three days to demolish and they had to bring in special heavy equipment to do it after their wrecking balls failed to make a dent in it. This thing had been built with massive 40-foot long oak beams with 12"x8" cross-sections that showed no signs of rot (my dad salvaged a piece of one of these beams and set it up as a bench in our garden, and it was still in good shape in 2012 despite being outside the whole time), so it could have easily been preserved as a historical site. In fact it had been declared an official historical site by the state just days before its destruction but the town council simply ignored that.

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