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It was 1972, and he had just moved to Winona. He heard an old country school was for sale not far from Saint Mary’s University, where the young geneticist had been hired to teach biology.
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Rose Kowles, right, and her husband Richard, put the last of Rose’s ornaments on the Christmas tree Thursday evening in the living room of their turn-of-the-century home. The Kowles purchased the home, which had been converted into a country school, in 1972 and have spent the last 36 years restoring it. The Kowles’ home will be one of several featured on this weekend’s WCHS tour of homes.
(Photo by Melissa Carlo/Winona Daily News) |
Kowles went to see the old Gilmore Valley School. It was “a wreck.” It had sat vacant for seven years. With peeling paint, it looked like a shack sitting in waist-deep weeds.
“I thought, ‘Geez, I want it,’” Kowles said.
He called his wife, Rose, back in Anoka and told her he’d bought an old school house. She was delighted.
“I wanted something old,” said Rose, an antique collector and dealer.
Today, the school is again a home, one the Kowles have labored over for 35 years. They plastered walls. They pried up tiles. They stripped the wood trim and patched thousands of nail holes.
Their home is one of seven that will be featured on the Winona County Historical Society’s annual tour of homes Sunday.
It wasn’t always a school. The farmhouse was built in 1899 by Charles Bergler on a hillside in the valley south of Winona. Two families lived there until 1915, when School District 87 bought it and converted it into Gilmore Valley School, with one large classroom downstairs, another up. The school closed in 1965 when the school district merged into Winona Area Public Schools.
After 50 years as a school, it needed some work. For starters, there was no kitchen.
“It was not liveable, but we moved in anyway,” Richard said Thursday as he showed off the kitchen they built where the library and boys bathroom had been.
And after it sat vacant for so long, the neighbors took a while to get used to having a family there. There were lots of kids in the area, Rose said, and many of them had gone to school in the building.
“We’d be eating dinner and kids would come walking in,” she said.
One of the Bergler descendants was still haying the yard. Rose recalls being surprised to see a tractor drive past the window one day.
“That was cool,” she said. “We didn’t even have a lawn mower.”
Then came the restoration.
Richard had worked construction jobs during the summer while he was in school, so he was comfortable doing much of the labor. The couple pulled up masonite tiles in the downstairs classroom that would become their living and dining room, not knowing what was underneath.
“We pulled it up and — oh, my God, it’s maple,” he said.
When they got tired of pulling up tile, Richard put down pine floors upstairs.
They made use of the materials at hand, too. Hand-hewn timbers from a barn in Rollingstone run through the living/dining room. The kitchen cabinets were made with barn boards from a barn in Anoka, Minn. The cloak room, which has been converted to a family room, has walls lined with boards from a barn that had been across the street.
There were no indoor cellar stairs, so Richard salvaged a spiral staircase from the old Saint Mary’s library.
“We were real scavengers,” he said.
Over the years, the schoolhouse became a home again.
Richard summed it up: “We had a vision.”
On the Tour
Rose and Richard Kowles’ former country school home will be one of seven buildings featured in the Winona County Historical Society’s annual Christmas Candlelight House Tour Sunday. The following homes will be open from 3 to 8 p.m. for the self-guided tour:
- Gilmore Valley School (Kowles home), 1293 Country Drive
- Wayne and Bonnie Kelly home, 53 W. Lake Blvd.
- St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 265 Lafayette St.
- KC Saxon home, 265 E. Wabasha St.
- Ron and Barb Hesch home, 155 Waterford Circle
- Paul and Mary Kreidermacher home, 154 Park St., Rollingstone
- Rollingstone Creamery (home of Steve and Pat Speltz), 134 Washington St., Rollingstone
- The Luxembourg Heritage Museum in Rollingstone will be serving refreshments during the tour. Tickets are $12 and will be available at the Historical Society beginning at noon Sunday. For information, call (507) 454-2723.
