BELLWEATHER. The Bellweather County Courthouse has begun a long-planned project to digitize more than a century of property and land records, some dating to the town's founding in 1867.

The historical records are deeds, surveys and conveyances, stored in the courthouse's basement records room, where staff have spent recent weeks cataloguing files before scanning.

"These documents are the memory of the county," said courthouse employee Evelyn Shaw, who is coordinating the project. "A lot of Bellweather's story is in those filing cabinets: who owned what, and when it changed hands."

The project comes as the town weighs several development proposals that turn on older titles, including the Vale Mill lands. Officials stressed the digitization is routine and unrelated to any specific application.

Access to the records room remains restricted to authorized staff during the cataloguing. The courthouse expects the first batch of scanned records to be available to the public early next year.