The long effort to create a permanent home for Concord’s famous horse-drawn coaches might get a $160,000 boost if the City Council goes ahead with plans to contribute to the renovation of the former Concord Stables building near the high school.

The work would include the removal or mitigation of hazardous materials, patching roof leaks and adding security measures like cameras and tougher doors, according to city staff recommendations. It would be a prelude to taking the long-empty building, which dates to 1905 and housed the city’s horses used for work such as road building and snow removal before motor vehicles took over, and turning it into a museum for the Abbot-Downing Historical Society. This would let the society display, among other things, their collection of Concord Coaches.

The council will consider taking $160,000 from the unassigned fund balance for this work at their Monday meeting.

The former stables, on the parking lot of the high school on Warren Street, were sold to the city by the Concord School District in April. The price was $1, which includes space to park eight cars and a “sanitary sewer easement” if improvements are needed for the site’s connection to city sewers.

The stables were built in 1905, but haven’t been used for decades.

The Abbot-Downing Company was the largest builder of stagecoaches in the United States for a century through the early 1900s and employed hundreds of people in Concord. Its coaches were sold as far away as New Zealand, South America and Africa, and were highly sought after for trips to the American West before railroads came along.

A major piece of the Abbott-Downing Historical Society’s mission has been acquiring and preserving coaches. The coaches are kept in a barn on the Hopkinton Fair Grounds and are seldom available for public view.

The Concord Stables building was designed by local architects James Randlett and George Griffin, who designed the Garrison School in Concord. That explains the building’s interest to historians since few architect-designed urban stables for workhorses are left in New England.