After over a half-century of serving the citizens of Northeast Georgia, the old Habersham EMC headquarters on Highway 115 in Clarkesville will soon be no more. The 63-year-old building is being demolished.
“The structure was built in the 1950s and has sat vacant for a while. To remodel or renovate the building is cost-prohibitive,” says Nicole Dover, HEMC’s Director of Strategy and Communications.
Powering rural communities
The Habersham Electric Membership Cooperative (now Habersham Electric Membership Corporation) was established under President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Rural Electric Administration. Northeast Georgia residents came together in 1938 and formed the nonprofit member-owned cooperative to serve rural Habersham, White, Hall, Stephens, Rabun and Lumpkin counties. Establishing the cooperative at that time was necessary, according to HEMC’s website, because “the investor-owned power suppliers didn’t believe it was profitable to build power lines to the farm families spread out in the rural areas.”
The cooperative’s first office was a storefront on Washington Street in Clarkesville. Twenty years later, HEMC moved into the building that’s now under demolition.
A new era
In 2006, HEMC moved into its new headquarters on a hill overlooking the 1958 structure. Habersham County then rented the old building for its tax, tag, and tax assessors offices. The local Veterans Administration also was housed at the old HEMC site.
Habersham County Tax Commissioner June Black-Warren was among the last people to work in the old HEMC building. She and her staff were there for twelve years before moving across town to the new county administration building in 2019.
“We liked being over there because when we were at the courthouse we were more a direction office,” she says, explaining that people frequently popped into their office to ask how to get somewhere.
After moving to the HEMC location, that changed.
“The people who came to see us were there to see us. It was more open space. It was more personable,” she says. “It was nice talking with the taxpayers and having that close connection. We liked it over there.”
Black-Warren says operating out of the old HEMC headquarters also opened their eyes to new ways to better serve the community.
“It was the first time we had a drive-through,” she says. As a result, when the county built its new administration office, they put in a drive-through for taxpayers’ convenience.
Like so many other local landmarks, the old HEMC building fell into a state of disrepair in the years since being permanently vacated. The cooperative contracted with Blue Ridge Grading & Landscaping, Inc. to tear down the building and reclaim the site.
Demolition began in August and should be completed by the end of this year.
Dover tells Now Habersham that, at this time, “there are no plans for the site.” She says grass will be planted on the empty lot to combat erosion and keep the area “pleasing to the eye.”
