Columnist Susan Snyder: Building a future is not easy

Monday, Jan. 5, 2004 | 8:16 a.m.

Charlene Keller has no problem with newcomers invading her central Nevada town.

As owner of Austin's Lincoln Motel, she's a newcomer of sorts. Keller grew up in rural Nevada, but moved away. She returned a year ago to buy the motel with her husband and retire in the former silver-mining boomtown.

An invitation-only 19th-century New Year's Eve party hosted by another Austin newcomer last week brought some grumblings from old-timers who say they like Austin the way it always was.

Maybe they don't own motels.

The party that attracted historic preservation enthusiasts from across Nevada filled all 18 of Keller's rooms.

"It was a big plus for the community," Keller said the morning after the party. "Usually, I only get busy if we get storms and people don't want to drive over the summit at night."

A town can't survive on summertime tourism, she said.

Across Nevada's interior, newcomers and outsiders are quietly buying tumbledown historic buildings in hopes of restoring them to grandeur and attracting tourists and their wallets.

Red Roberts, a Carson City rancher and engineer, bought the old Goldfield Hotel for $360,000 during an August auction. At the time he said he hoped to re-open it. The 1908 hotel closed in the 1940s.

John Ekman, of Cerritos, Calif., often visited his uncle in Goldfield in the 1950s. He recalled pressing his nose to the hotel window and seeing fine, gray table cloths spread over fully set tables in the dining room.

"The wine glasses were turned upside down and underneath the tablecloth was perfectly white. That's how long they had been sitting there," Ekman said.

Those childhood visits stuck with him. Ekman and his wife, Ellen, have purchased a 19th-century attorney's home and some railroad property in Goldfield. He has placed an 1890s railroad passenger car on the property and plans to restore it for visitors to enjoy.

They travel to Goldfield twice a month to do restoration work on the home and train car, Ellen said. It's labor they love.

"We're hoping to be part of the refurbishment of Goldfield," she said.

Angela Haag and her partner, Steve Cramer, bought Goldfield's decaying bank building in 2000 at about the same time she sold her successful Lake Tahoe pizza restaurant.

"Sometimes I don't know what I was thinking," Haag said, laughing. "These places are really a lot of work and a lot of money."

But they can bring a lot of money to communities that desperately need it. Austin's faltering economy has initiated serious talk of closing its school. The option is busing children 88 miles to Battle Mountain.

That's not a choice a lot of parents likely will make. A potential buyer for Austin's Silver State hotel pulled out this year because he has three children and didn't want to risk it, Keller said. No one else has bought it.

A town without children loses more than Little League. It loses its future.

"We need changes. Most of the people here have been in business 25 to 30 years. They're burned out," Keller said. "The area would have kept on dying without (newcomers). They invigorate people."

archive