The Downtown Sylva Association was recently awarded an $8,530 grant by the Percee B. Ferebee Endowment to help finance the Bridge Park Project.

The Bridge Park Project is a collaborative community effort to build a new Town of Sylva park in a portion of the municipal parking lot off Mill Street in downtown Sylva. The park will be adjacent to a new footbridge over Scott’s Creek to Poteet Park, scheduled for construction this winter. The Downtown Sylva Association is the project’s financial sponsor.

With the addition of the Ferebee funds, the drive to finance Bridge Park has gathered $76,000 in just over one year’s time. All of these funds are earmarked for the performance pavilion, a timber frame structure that will sit creek-side. The pavilion will be used for outdoor music concerts, performances and community gatherings of all types. A separate fund, started by the Sylva Garden Club, contains more than $5,000 for the landscaping of the new park. Further enhancements of the adjacent municipal parking lot and the pedestrian corridor to Main Street are planned.

Construction on the park’s pavilion began in October with the completion of the foundation. The DSA expects to contract with the Timber Frame Guild, a national non-profit group that instructs in the art of timber framing, for a June 2008 workshop in Sylva. The end result of the workshop will be the frame of the Bridge Park pavilion.

Percy B. Ferebee was a resident of Cherokee County. He established the Percy B. Ferebee Endowment as part of his will and grants are awarded to support charitable, scientific and literary projects, and in particular, governmental and civic projects designed to further the cultural, social, economic and physical well-being of residents of Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Jackson, Macon and Swain counties of North Carolina and the Cherokee Indian Reservation.

For more information about the Bridge Park Project visit the Web site at bridgepark.org or call 828.586.1577.