Something new is coming to the Butler County Historical Society’s Lowrie/Shaw House property at 123 W. Diamond St.

The organization broke ground Friday for the construction of a storage building, dubbed the carriage house, on the back corner of the historical society’s property

According to Pat Collins, the society’s administrative director, the 2,428-square-foot building will have a full basement, first floor and a mezzanine.

The building will have a “board and batten” construction and a slate roof.

“Bascially it’s going to look like an outbuilding, like a carriage house. It’s going to have the doors on the upper part like you would use to bring hay in,” said Collins.

“Inside the mechanical systems are such they would be proper for our collections of various artifacts,” she said.

Collins said the total construction cost will be $150,000, and the society will take out a small loan to help with the costs.

“This day we’ve been planning for what seems like forever,” said Brett Ligo of Ligo Architects in Slippery Rock and president of the society’s board of directors, who donated his services in designing the building.

“We are calling it a carriage house although it is a new building, but it’s on the same site,” said Ligo. “We designed it in such a way that we wanted it to look like it had been part of the original site.”

“If you are facing the (Shaw) house with the courthouse at your back, it is on the far left to the rear. In part, we located it so it would leave an area for possible museum expansion in the future,” Ligo said.

“We’re committed to staying within the city of Butler,” said Ligo. “In the future, we are looking to incorporate a museum through an addition.”

He added the slate for the project had been salvaged from an old house and barn.

W.K. Thomas and Associates of Butler is the contractor.

Brent Thomas, its owner and president and a former member of the society board, said he expects the construction will take about 12 weeks once all the permits have been secured and be completed by the first of the year.

Jeff Allen, the project manager for Thomas and Associates, said footers for the building should be poured by Tuesday and block work could begin Wednesday and Thursday.

“It will integrate well with the Shaw House with the wood siding and the carriage house look,” said Thomas. “The Historical Society certainly needs the space after moving out of the Heritage Center.”

The society closed its Heritage Center museum at 119 W. New Castle St. in 2011.

Collins said the new building’s interior will have an open floor plan.

“It won’t be segregated into rooms where we have to worry later about tearing down a wall to do something we need to do,” she said.

“Since we sold the Heritage Center two years ago, we’ve been renting storage space,” Collins said. “But our paper collections have grown. We’ve got cars, oil cans, oil signs, the Armco collection, the Pullman Standard collection, the glass collection.”

“The inside will be climate controlled: the humidity, the heat and cold will be kept as they should be,” she said.

“Our collection is growing. It’s an exciting time here at the historical society to be able to preserve so much of Butler’s history,” said Collins.