Let me tell you a story. And I promise that if you keep reading it, eventually there will be a point to the story.

A long, long time ago, I lived in a place far, far away.

My wife, Pam, and I lived in a little town called Enderlin, North Dakota, and we owned and ran the local newspaper, the Enderlin Independent.

In 1972 Enderlin was a very nice little town of about 1,350 residents. It had two banks, two grocery stores, a drug store, a clothing store, Ben Franklin, V&S Variety, two cafes, a supper club, a bar, a lumberyard, a bowling alley, a swimming pool, and well, you get the picture. Today it is a town of 880 folks and not nearly as many businesses and amenities…just like so many rural Midwest small towns. But there still is a newspaper, last time I checked.

The town lore was that Enderlin was named after the supposed German-sounding words “Ender Line” meaning the end of the line. The railroad once went as far as Enderlin and no further and there was a roundhouse and big station/depot, and lots of railroad workers who lived there. That went away over the years, also, well before we lived there.

Enderlin was, and is, surrounded by a lot of even smaller little towns. Most of them were pretty tiny back in 1972, and are even smaller today. Many have interesting names. There are Alice, Kathryn and Marion, supposedly named after the wife and daughter of the first North Dakota governor, or the daughters of railroad executives. There were the little towns of Sheldon and Leonard. I am not sure who they are named after, but I wonder if the producer of ‘The Big Bang Theory’ knew of these towns when he created his two main characters for the TV show. There is also the town (and I am not making this up) of Buttzville. Your guess is as good as mine as to its origin.

But I digress.

Near Enderlin there also was, and still is, the small town of Nome. In 1972 it had a population of less than 100, and today it is right around 50. I think folks thought it was named after Nome, Alaska, and that both were named after a Nome Valley in Sweden.

There was not much there in 1972 for either houses or other buildings and hardly anything that could be called a downtown. But there was an old school building, which had closed up just before I was there.

The high school closed in 1966, the elementary school in 1970.

The Nome School sat on the northeast side of town and just got in worse shape year after year, decade after decade. Eventually trees and bushes grew up around it and, seriously, the school disappeared from sight. It was totally forgotten about. Out of sight, out of mind.

Until something unbelievable happened. In 2018 it was rediscovered by two women, both fiber artists, who transformed this falling down old school building in the tiniest of towns into a showplace. They completely restored, remodeled and added to it, transforming it into a fiber arts retreat center, event center and boutique hotel complete with bar and restaurant. It opened in 2021 and it is gorgeous.

Go ahead, Google it. It would be worth your time to check it out, especially since they have a great video that shows what the school building looked like when they bought it, and a look at all of the work they did to restore it. It is really astounding.

We have been blessed to have some similar folks in Faribault County, who have created some places out of abandoned buildings. Jenna Johnson taking an abandoned printing plant and creating 10 Talents Art Center tops the list, but there are also places like the Golden Bubble, Margaret’s Pub, the Main Street Agency building, and well, several others.

This one in little Nome, North Dakota, is on an even larger scale than anything I have seen before, in a town that no one has even heard of, much less been to.

The two women say it was a lot of hard work but worth it. “We’ve poured our blood, sweat, and tears (and let’s be real, a whole lotta money) into restoring this historic gem to its former glory,” they say on their website.

You probably think I am now going to refer to the infamous Three Sisters in downtown Blue Earth. I totally have to admit that when I read about this awesome project in Nome, the Blue Earth Sisters did, indeed, come to my mind. Being a realist, I know the clock is ticking on those buildings, and the possibility of them being restored and saved is getting to be mighty slim.

However, after seeing what happened in Nome, maybe there is still hope.

Oh yeah, Hope, North Dakota, is somewhere near Enderlin, too.