A Brainerd branch

Nam Zamata sits on a bench in the Brainerd Mission Cemetery between tall oak trees and cemetery markers.

To the east of the cemetery lays the now-empty U.S. Postal Service’s remote encoding center. The nearby Office Depot also will soon be abandoned.

But Mrs. Zamata and a group of other community members see an opportunity — one for a new library with greenspace and a campus connecting to the Brainerd Mission Cemetery and the Brainerd Levee.

“There’s a lot of different groups working on a lot of different pieces and it’s about the revitalization of Brainerd,” she said.

A lot of those revitalization efforts come as several local residents have complained of high crime rates and nightclubs blasting loud music into the night next to residential areas. Some residents have said those issues have hindered revitalization efforts.

Mrs. Zamata said the current lease for the Brainerd library branch, which is owned by Luken Holdings, ends in October. She is working as chairwoman of the Eastgate Library Advisory Committee, which is looking at different options for the branch.

One option could be acquiring the Office Depot building and parking lot next to the mission. She said she has not spoken with the landlords of the building yet, but plans to in the near future.

But the full vision would be building a completely new library patterned after the old mission that served as a place where Christian missionaries taught young Cherokee children.

“This is not a two-year project,” Mrs. Zamata said. “This is years.”

Councilwoman Carol Berz latched onto the project after conducting a series of summits across Brainerd. The idea for a library branch patterned after the old mission came from those focus groups, she said.

Another idea would be to take the historic Cherokee collection now housed in the main downtown library and move it to the new Brainerd site, she said.

“Why not expand the Brainerd Mission, make it a park and a library branch?” she asked. “It would be a special library. A place of historical significance.”

David Clapp, executive director of the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Bicentennial Library, supports the idea.

“There appears to be a fair chance we’ll be able to pull together property,” he said.

He said there is property in the area and the city has talked about tradeoffs with some of the surrounding property owners. Nashville-based Robbins Properties owns Brainerd Village where the old Office Depot was located, records show.

So far, most of the dealings have been with that group, he said.

He said the library is trying to find grants, sponsors and also talk to businesses in the Brainerd area and also the Cherokee nation to perhaps get funding without asking taxpayers first. Representatives with the Eastern Branch of the Cherokee Nation could not be contacted.

At the downtown library, some of the Cherokee Indian collection now sits underneath an air conditioning unit with a threat of leaks and documents being damaged, he said. Moving it to Brainerd would also mean the collection can get seen more often, he said.

“It’s not as accessible as we’d like to make it,” he said.

The mission, which stands next to Eastgate Mall, is bound by blacktop, Mrs. Zamata said. The hope is to create an area that could would be green, friendly to the eye and appealing as a place of learning and ripping up much of the black asphalt now there, she said.

“It’s a vision thing,” Mrs. Zamata said.