At the corner of Locust and Birch streets in Alcoa, a white-paneled building surrounded by stately deciduous trees has stood for more than a century. The home-like structure, though modest, has been listed on the U.S. Department of the Interior’s National Register of Historic Places since 2017.
Best known as Blount County’s oldest standing schoolhouse, the historic Vose School sat empty and deteriorating for years after its last tenant, a Department of Motor Vehicles driver’s license branch, moved out in the mid-1990s. Before that, the building had served intermittently as a school for children with cerebral palsy, a school for the handicapped and, long before both, a school to relieve overcrowding in the Alcoa City Schools system.
After decades of underuse, Reagan Design + Construction, a Knoxville company specializing in historic building restoration, won a bid in 2020 to convert the school into multi-family rental housing…