DOVER, Del.- The historic Scull Mansion stands half demolished as of Wednesday morning, and it won't be long before it's turned into a Bayhealth Kent Campus parking lot.
Crews began tearing the house down Monday, something Dover's history buffs have been trying to prevent for nearly 3 years.
Dover neighbor Thomas Smith shared his thoughts, "the stories of that building and it's importance to our community will be no more and I think as a community we will be less because of that."
Smith, along with about 400 others, signed a petition in 2020, asking Bayhealth officials to consider other options for their master plan.
Bayhealth Chief Strategy Officer John Van Gorp said in a statement that tearing the mansion down was a "necessary decision" to improve drainage infrastructure and add more employee parking.
He went on to say, "while Bayhealth worked with community stakeholders to try to save the building, we were unable to find a solution but will continue work to salvage portions of the home."
Smith tells WBOC there was only so much the public could do to keep the building standing, because it sits just outside Dover's Historic District.
"Although the home was represented on the [National Register of Historic Places] that offered it no protection," he said. "It's technically outside the historic zone so demolition certainly was an answer to parking needs."
The man who created the petition to "Save Scull Mansion" in 2020, Nathan Attard, released a statement when demolition began this week. Attard called Bayhealth's decsion regrettable, "when so many Doverites take painstaking pride in retaining the history of our community."
Bayhealth officials delayed demolition for months to allow time for community suggestions. One idea was moving the building, but that was deemed to challenging and too costly.
What made Scull Mansion so historic, besides it being 160 years old, was it's Italian design style which is said to be rare in the capital city.