HomeMy WebLinkAbout2024-1665
Ramirez, Jonathan
From:Lucero Aguirre <luceroaguirre.studio@gmail.com>
Sent:Monday, February 5, 2024 11:52 PM
To:Agenda Item Comment
Subject:Public agenda comment from community member - Sprout Springs Historic District
agenda item
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C.3. SPROUT SPRINGS HISTORIC DISTRICT
Dear City Council Members,
I thank you in advance for your time and opportunity to provide comment on this matter. I write to ask for
you to consider approving the communities and lineages of Sprout Springs request for the area to be
established as a historic district.
I have been a citizen of Fayetteville for over 5 years, learning much about the life blood that is the Yvonne
Richardson Center, as well as the Fayetteville Senior Center, and most importantly the residential areas
of South Fayetteville within Sprout Springs to the Black communities of the city. We currently are in a
time where housing has become a competition in the area as well as the rest of the country. During
these times, I ask that we remember the parts of Fayetteville that are crucial, that make it what it has
become today. To preserve Sprout Springs would be to preserve what history is left that physically can
surrounds us in this specific space. Stories of a home that once was does not have to be an anticipation
that the living citizens of Fayetteville (who are descendants of the enslaved African Americans who once
were un willfully brought, escaped or freed, and later settled in the area) have to have. Black history is
very much apart of Fayetteville’s history everyday.
The city has begun to take steps in efforts of prioritizing these historically-overlooked histories, and the
lived and remembered Black citizens who contributed so much to Fayetteville, thanks to groups like the
Black Historic Preservation Commission. This has recently progressed with the much celebrated re-
naming of Archibald Yell Boulevard, a former Arkansas governor and slave holder, to Nelson Hackett
Boulevard, a formerly enslaved man who escaped from Fayetteville and found freedom in 1841.
Members of the Fayetteville city council, I implore you to vote yes to establishing the area of Sprout
Springs (along with the Yvonne Richardson Center & Fayetteville Senior Center), a historic district before
it slips through our fingers and becomes unrecognizable to its beloved community members.
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Thank you,
Lucero Aguirre
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