Wynn Center plans community hub in Winchester building reuse project

MacKenzie Gieseke, board president of the Wynn Center, was overseeing plans to turn an old Winchester building into a community hub, a reuse project meant to give the Scott County seat a shared space for everyday use. The effort was being framed as more than a cosmetic renovation, with local residents hoping the building could gather people and support programming.

The project took shape in Winchester, a city founded in 1830 and platted by A.P. and M.A. Hickinson in what was then Morgan County. Winchester is now the county seat of Scott County and part of the Jacksonville Micropolitan Statistical Area, which gives any new shared civic space an outsized role in a small regional center.

That local importance was underscored by the town’s historic core. The Winchester Historic District included 438 buildings, 273 of them contributing buildings, and development in the district began in the 1830s. By the 1870s, most of the district’s significant buildings had been completed, leaving modern reuse efforts to fit into a community shaped by a long preservation legacy.

For the Wynn Center, the building plan was a bid to keep one more structure in active use instead of letting it drift into neglect. The idea centered on a community hub, a place that could serve as a shared asset for Winchester rather than stand as an empty reminder of what the town hoped to do. In a place where the historic landscape and civic identity are tightly tied together, the project’s real measure will be whether the building becomes a practical part of daily life in Winchester.