Siler City City Hall, also known as the Siler City Town Hall or Municipal Building, is a historic
city hall
In local government, a city hall, town hall, civic centre (in the UK or Australia), guildhall, or a municipal building (in the Philippines), is the chief administrative building of a city, town, or other municipality. It usually houses ...
Colonial Revival
The Colonial Revival architectural style seeks to revive elements of American colonial architecture.
The beginnings of the Colonial Revival style are often attributed to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which reawakened Americans to the archi ...
style building. It is faced in granite and features a two-story, tetrastyle pedimented pavilion with a
portico
A portico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls. This idea was widely used in ancient Greece and has influenced many cult ...
''in antis''. It is one of three extant
Works Progress Administration
The Works Progress Administration (WPA; renamed in 1939 as the Work Projects Administration) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to carry out public works projects, i ...
buildings in Chatham County.
The building was constructed on the site of the former Thompson School, a private school that had operated in the late 1800s and that had been torn down in 1932. In 1939 the town signed an agreement to purchase the property for $6,701.
In February 1939, the town board of commissioners selected R. R. Markley, a Durham architect, to design the building and selected Carl Phillips, a Siler City contractor, to oversee construction. Granite for the construction was mined from the R. F. Hedrick quarry in Randolph County, and construction was completed in September 1940. The total cost of construction was $72,289, $51,000 of which was provided by a grant from the Works Progress Administration. Use of the building began in the autumn of 1940, and the formal dedication was held November 11, 1941.
It was listed on the
National Register of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...