New ‘Main Street’ development planned for Taylor

The Oxford Eagle
09/27/2005

A quiet, quirky community whose laid-back style draws a steady stream of tourists and locals down from Oxford is set to see dramatic changes in the coming years.

Some 150 new homes and a set of new retail, commercial and public buildings are planned as part of “Main Street Taylor,” a new project on the corner of Main Street (CR 3065) and CR 335 by local developer Campbell McCool with business partner Stewart Speed of Jackson.

Construction on the site about 200 yards from the Taylor Grocery catfish restaurant is slated to begin next spring, with a slow-and-steady approach stretching out five to seven years before all the homes are built.

Introducing the project to the Lafayette County Planning Commission on Monday evening, McCool said it will be nothing like the suburb-style neighborhoods that have been built in and around Oxford in recent years.

Arranged to encourage walking, the homes will be laid out on blocks in a traditional grid pattern, with carports reached through rear alleyways. The houses will be designed like the older homes in the community — with wooden siding, front porches and tin roofs.

Rather than selling lots to builders, McCool and Speed said they will build each house themselves, one by one, to ensure the same standards of quality.

“The tone of this project is everything,” McCool said this morning. “We just can’t leave anything to chance.”

Hands-on strategy

The process of envisioning a new central neighborhood for Taylor has been a careful process for McCool, who first bought the 60-acre farm known as the “old Buckley place” two and a half years ago.

Since then, he has been quietly discussing ideas for the property with residents of Taylor, where he and his family lived for the past three years and maintain a home after moving into Oxford.

The goal for the project is to build upon the community’s reputation as a magnet for artists and arts patrons, centered in recent years around the Taylor Arts gallery, just down from the catfish restaurant.

“That’s really all it’s got public-wise, yet people can’t get enough,” McCool said. “We want to create a few more neat things to go along with what’s already there.”

For the main-street-style row of commercial buildings at the front of the property, the developers envision housing a community cultural center, a Montessori art school, a barbecue restaurant, a general store and an antique mall.

Taylor Mayor Jim Hamilton told the planning commission that though most folks in Taylor would probably prefer the town never to change, a project like McCool’s seemed like the best sort of development.

“The conception that Taylor never changes is not true,” said Hamilton, a lifelong resident. “It has changed over time, and if it doesn’t change, it will be like some of these other communities that barely exist.”

Commissioner T.J. Ray said that while he would vote for the project as long as it met county regulations, he was against it “on an emotional level.”

“I hate to see Taylor go under — the old Taylor I knew and enjoyed,” he said. “I’m just amazed at someone wanting to come in and radically transform a lovely, bucolic community.”

But McCool said he wouldn’t have pursued the project were Taylor residents not in favor of it. And the concept, he said, hearkens back to the town’s heyday, when it bustled around schools, hotels and the railroad.

“You could quite easily make the case that we’re taking Taylor back to where it was 100 years ago,” he said.

After Monday’s pre-application conference, the developers plan to seek preliminary plat approval from the planning commission in November.