Chestnut Street house moves, BGMU plans power outages in move area

BOWLING GREEN, Ky.- Today is the day. The historical house on Chestnut Street is being moved to its new location. 

News 40 brought you this story last week. The house will slowly be moved by a control box operated by a walking worker. 

The house will begin it’s way down Chestnut Street around 4 p.m. and reach its destination on Oaklawn around 8 p.m. BGMU is moving electric lines today to accommodate the move. Outages will affect Chestnut Street from Ogden Avenue to the Bypass, Regents Avenue from Mimosa Alley to Chestnut Street and the Oaklawn Way/Nashville Road intersection. The length of the outages will be about two hours in each area around the relocation route. 

Jonathan Schwer is the new owner of the home and will eventually live in it with his family once restored.

“I’m a restorer and a preservationist by trade so this kind of falls in line with what I do anyways. We were looking for a historic home to restore and live in, and I hadn’t found one that hadn’t been adversely changed by remodeling and renovations so we have a time capsule here to work with which was the whole idea,” said Schwer.

The house is over 100 years old. Schwer wishes more people would save historical homes rather than demolish them.