Group hopes school renovation in Jasper will jumpstart downtown revitalization

Nearly 40 years ago, Elicia Madetzke was a student walking the hallways of the school in Jasper. Even before then, she hung around her mom’s special education office, looking outside the window to the very top floor. 

Today, she walks those same hallways, but with a different purpose in mind. 

Her old school, a 70,000-square-foot building, was constructed with Quartzite from a nearby quarry, just like the old hair salon and other structures that give this town of 600 people in southwestern Minnesota its distinctive feel. 

It’s a symbol of the area’s history – and also a solid structure that could just as well be reused. Indeed, its preservation, Madetzke hopes, will lead to a revitalization of a downtown that has grown stagnant since the school closed over 20 years ago. 

It won’t be easy, as many rural towns have struggled to revive downtowns that have been altered by population decline, big box stores and other changes. But that’s indeed the goal of Reclaim Community, an organization Madetzke founded in 2016. 

What the effort will ultimately look like remains unknown, though, based on the experiences of other small towns, it could lead to a burst of creativity, with studios for artists, rooms for art classes, performance spaces and shops where local kids can learn trade skills. 

The group has purchased two buildings in Jasper and is working to get them to a condition where the community can use them again. The smaller building, Bauman Hall, will most likely be completed first. Madetzke’s old school, built in 1911, is a larger project that she anticipates will take many more years to complete, although parts of the building are currently in use too.

Rebuilding the school is a big project. Right now, the roof and taking care of the mold and mildew are the main priorities. 

As for what it could be used for, there are still lots of ideas. But the group definitely wants to implement ‘adaptive reuse’ –  using what’s already there as much as they can. 

“You make a space work for the use that you want and do it in a way where you’re not moving a bunch of walls. You’re retaining as much of the integrity as you can… updating the things you need to update,” Madetzke said.

A reimagined downtown

Madetzke’s work was inspired by the demolition of many historic buildings in what was a once vibrant downtown. 

The Jasper school changed from a K-12 to an elementary in 1993, leaving many students to travel to schools in the cities of Pipestone, Edgerton and Luverne, Madetzke said. Ultimately, in 2001, the entire school closed. That impacted the whole area as downtown businesses slowly closed. In the years that followed, Madetzke said the city began to buy some of those buildings. 

What bothered her is that the buildings were being bought to be demolished. In her eyes, with some love and investment, the quartzite buildings could be usable. So in 2015, she sent letters to alumni with an idea to take community ownership of the school. In six weeks, they raised $40,000. 

“We just thought, ‘Let’s see what the alumni say,’” she said. “We sent out a letter (to) about 1,200 alumni, hand addressed, had to lick them. We just kept getting checks and checks and checks. We thought ‘Wow, people do care. People do want us to make an effort. So we’re going to do this.’”

Since then, Reclaim Community has done various fundraising events, like pancake feeds and art sales. In 2016, the non-profit was able to buy the Jasper school for $25,000 and get it listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2018, Bauman Hall, a building a couple of blocks away, went up for demolition, and Madetzke knew she wanted to purchase it. 

There’s already been lots of investment in these buildings, Madetzke said, referring to the Quartzite material, the process of creating the buildings and what they were used for. 

“This is a regional resource that is just as important as the Iron Range, I think, to Minnesota.  The mining, the history. We have Pipestone here, the Native American story. All of this stuff is so important to be told,” she said. “People come down the street all the time … they drive down and they love looking at architecture. They purposely come through Jasper just to drive down Main Street even though there’s not even anything you can really do in most of the buildings anymore.” 

She estimated that since the 1980s, the downtown has lost five or six buildings. “I just don’t understand why people are willing to throw away such a valuable resource that was invested by taxpayers,” she said. 

Arts and meeting spaces

The building purchased in 2018 is called Bauman Hall, and most recently was a hair salon and senior center. The group has been making fixes to the space to eventually use it as an arts incubator. But in the time since then, the bottom floor has served as an event space, hosting things like Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. 

Preserving the building doesn’t cost too much, she said. The high costs come when a building is not taken care of. 

“You can keep a building very cheaply. You can keep it preserved and mothballed. It takes incremental investment. It takes thought. It takes thinking about it and planning it,” Madetzke said. “If you invest your time and your effort into it, there’s more likely that you’re going to be passing on those stories and that to your children and the people that live here and people are going to care more about it when they actually have some sweat equity in it too.” 

She feels the buildings will become assets to the community more cheaply than the cost of rebuilding something. 

The smaller building will serve as a space to teach trades, like masonry, a skill she thinks smaller towns have lost. It’ll also have art classes, thanks to $25,000 in funding from a Mellon Foundation grant. Three artists will be helping with the program, with one teaching a children’s class, one teaching a general art class, and another artist working on a mural for the town alongside the students in the classes.

Madetzke opens up the outline for the mural that Nichole Cross will be working on for the group. Credit: MinnPost photo by Ava Kian

Nichole Cross is one of the participating artists. She’s not originally from Jasper, and when she visited, the lack of third spaces – social areas separate from home and workplaces – immediately caught her attention. 

“It’s a weird thing,” she said. “It’s on a county line. So like, half of it’s in one county, half of it’s in another. They got rid of their local schools, so all the kids are being shipped to different schools around. There’s nowhere to eat, there’s nowhere like a hotel, or anything. They were losing their third spaces.” 

Bauman Hall was an event hall in the 1900s — and its stones were gathered from a nearby state park in South Dakota. The upstairs has a big stage, which Madetzke sees the potential for musicians to take advantage of.

“I really think having a little recording studio, performing space up here would be amazing for small groups coming to town,” she said. “Giving people in the area of opportunity to perform, to give people access to the arts for free.” 

“It just has a lot of potential for them to have a place where they can congregate,” Cross said. 

The goal is to make third spaces that cultivate innovation, creativity and businesses. 

“Back in the 30s, 40s, 50s there were 300 businesses in Jasper. Three hundred in the heyday. Now we have 30, 40,” Madetzke said. “There’s always vacant space. We need housing. Why do we have two apartments above the banks that are empty? Why do we have apartments above the museum that are empty? Why did we demolish this building that would have had two to three business spaces and two to three or four apartments above?” 

A model from other cities

Reclaim Community’s effort in Jasper is modeled off of other towns that have done similar things, such as Granite Falls, in Yellow Medicine County, which has made a multifunctional building with an event space, stage and recording studio — or the Smiley Building in Durango, Colorado, which was transformed from a junior high school to a space for various businesses, designers, architects, offices, non-profits, studios and a Montessori school. 

Madetzke drew inspiration from Bob Yapp, of Missouri, who has spent his career restoring houses and training those interested in preservation. 

Since purchasing both buildings, Reclaim Community has been making upgrades and improvements one step at a time, as its funding allows. 

Madetzke said they typically get 150-250 people at their events, like fundraisers. The board is completely volunteer-based. “We have some people who really dedicated their hearts to it,” Madetzke said. 

Randy Larson, for example, graduated from the Jasper school in 1974. He later moved away from Jasper, but has since come back and has been involved with Reclaim Community.

“It’s a great space, a lot of room,” Larson said. “We all have a lot of ideas” in regards to how the space could be used. 

In the meantime, as they wait for grant cycles and repairs, they can use the space for various things. For example, one group was interested in using it for a haunted house this fall, some businesses have reached out about using it for welding and storage, and others are interested in renting some of it as a mechanic space.