GREENFIELD — Three weeks after the Franklin County YMCA submitted its permit to demolish the Zion Korean Church, the Historical Commission voted unanimously to declare the 182-year-old church historically significant and hold a public hearing before a potential demolition delay.

The commission took the vote on Thursday during a meeting attended by YMCA Executive Director Grady Vigneau and Chief Financial Officer & Director of Human Resources Tracy Fisher.

Although Commissioner Jeremy Ebersole said that the commission voted with the “intent” to invoke a demolition delay, Fisher noted that the Y has not yet determined that it will, in fact, demolish the church.

“I feel like there’s an understanding that our intent is absolutely to demolish the church — that has never absolutely been our intent,” Fisher said. “I just want you guys to understand that we’ve gone through a significant amount of work to try to find somebody to move that building, and we’re not stopping that.”

Fisher also noted that a demolition delay hearing must be scheduled within 45 days of the commission’s receipt of the demolition application. Given the relatively short time span with which the hearing must be scheduled and the upcoming Christmas and New Year’s holidays, the commission agreed to work with Mayor Ginny Desorgher’s Chief of Staff Erin Anhalt to find a date for the hearing.

According to the city’s demolition delay ordinance, if the commission determines the demolition of a building would be “detrimental to the historical or architectural heritage” of the city, it can enact a six-month demolition delay while the owner makes “bona fide and reasonable efforts to locate a purchaser to preserve, rehabilitate or restore the subject building.”

“If a contributing building to a historic district is removed, it diminishes the integrity of the entire district,” Ebersole said of the church. “If enough of those buildings disappear, then the entire historic district can be a risk … they all kind of work together as a cohesive whole.”

Franklin County’s YMCA acquired the church at 463 Main St. in spring 2023 through the help of an anonymous donor and has been determining whether to demolish the structure to make room for program space or renovate the building to bring it up to code. When the commission learned of the church’s potential demolition in August, it sought ways to preserve it, claiming that the structure held historical significance for the role it played as a meeting place during the abolitionist movement.

According to records from the Massachusetts Cultural Resource Information System — a database featuring information on historic properties — the Zion Korean Church was built as the Coldbrook Springs Baptist Church in Barre in the 1840s.

Records indicate that the church was, until recently, Greenfield’s oldest church still in use, and had to be either demolished or moved to make room for construction of the Quabbin Reservoir. The Greenfield Christian Scientist congregation purchased the Greek revival-style church and moved it to Greenfield in 1936, where it has served as a prominent location on the abolitionist lecture circuit.

When the building was featured in a 2021 walking tour highlighting Greenfield’s ties to the Underground Railroad and abolitionist movement, Greenfield High School history teacher Luke Martin explained that speakers such as William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass had spoken at the church when it was in Barre.

Anthony Cammalleri can be reached at acammalleri@recorder.com or 413-930-4429.