In 1989, Washington became one of five Missouri towns selected as a pilot community for the newly formed Missouri Main Street Program. In the years that followed, Downtown Washington, Inc. helped to re-shape the layout and aesthetic of the down­town district, and partnered with the city to renovate Main Street and actively promote downtown retailers. Then they really moved outside the box – they took out loans to purchase historic buildings and started to revitalize them on their own. Today, Washington has more than 500 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, restaurants and galleries filling the town’s historic brick buildings, and a boom in residential construction that has produced reno­vated apartments in Washington’s signature century-old brick buildings.