By Diana McFarland

Managing editor

The beleaguered Rescue Community Hall is now on the market for $199,000.

The circa 1922 building is listed with 1^st Advantage Realty LLC and has 3,364 square feet.

Photos show a spacious building with a brick exterior, shiny wooden floors, a kitchen, restrooms and a large mural of a ship on the sea. 

The sale price nearly matches the assessment value of $199,900, according to Isle of Wight County assessment data. {mprestriction ids=”1,2,3,4,5,6″}

For decades, the building was a meeting place and event center for the Rescue community, but in recent years, the maintenance had become overwhelming to the owners, the Rescue Community League.

Community League trustee Marcie Spoonhoward has described the building as “falling apart.”

Another component of the decision to sell the building was that the Rescue/Battery Park Ruritan Club, which had used the hall for years as a meeting place, was dissolving.

The fate of the building was the subject of a recent Carrollton Civic League meeting where some were in favor of rehabilitating it for other uses and other were more ambivalent. During the meeting, Newport District Supervisor William McCarty offered to personally pay for an inspection of the building before moving forward with selling it.

Spoonhoward said she would take that idea, as well as others, back to the Rescue Community League Board.

Efforts to reach members of the Community League Board were unsuccessful.

At the November Isle of Wight Board of Supervisors meeting, McCarty said he talked to County Administrator Randy Keaton about the issue.

Keaton said county staff would do an informal assessment on what is needed to bring the building up to code and have that information relayed back to the Board. 

The county is still trying to coordinate a time to do the assessment, but it’s not known if that is needed now that the property is on the market, said Isle of Wight Assistant County Administrator Don Robertson.

The Rescue Community Hall was once a school and was transferred to private hands in 1940.  {/mprestriction}