By Steve Gibbs

I HAVE PIECEMEAL HIGHLIGHTS AND OBSERVATIONS from our month-long hibernation in Ridgway that I would like to share.

First, I’d like to acknowledge the philanthropic contributions of Ridgway’s wealthiest families toward maintaining the town’s heritage and vitality. Whenever a historic building has gone on the endangered list — empty, abandoned, in disrepair — someone has always stepped up and bought the building, restored it, and did their best to reintegrate it back into the active community and recoup their investment. Sometimes they did. Always the community benefited from the facelifts.

Some examples: Larry Buehler, timber baron, has purchased and restored several historic homes around town, one in my neighborhood after he’d visited Versailles and became impressed with its expansive cobblestone courts. The house is now a home and floral boutique owned by Larry’s daughter. Her cobblestone driveway can hold 20 cars.

Larry also bought and revitalized the Oasis, Ridgway’s only Main Street restaurant, by rebuilding it as a log cabin with rough-hewn timbers and Amish carpenters, then rechristening it the Lumberjack. An indoor model logging train rides the rafters around the perimeter walls that are painted with murals of local history. He later sold the business to the chef and moved on. Larry also rescued the West End playground when lack of funding threated it with dismantlement. He funds it now. He built a lake on his property outside of town big enough to be included on maps. It’s called Lake Larry.

Dennis “Denny” Heindl, powdered metallurgy baron, has left his mark in many places. Sue and I walked up to my old high school, home of the Elkers. It has been transformed — not the building, a well-kept rectangular brick doughnut — but the sports fields behind. We have a new stadium with two football fields and a track spread across the top of Hyde’s Hill. At the entrance, a gray granite monument reads “The Dennis and Rose Heindl Memorial Stadium.”

Denny recently purchased our abandoned railway station downtown and had it restored to what it must have looked like on opening day. He’s now wide open to suggestions of what to do with the structure. It must be nonprofit. The railroad still owns the land.

Mayor Dr. Udarbe — yes, we have a Filipino mayor who is also the town’s doctor — moved to town with his family and rescued our central downtown elementary school, a majestic three-story brick empire full of classrooms that held hundreds of students in my time. For a long time it sat empty, like colony collapse disorder. It is now the Udarbe Complex — apartments upstairs, offices and storage downstairs.

Sue and I met the Udarbes one Sunday morning as they exited the Methodist church, and Mrs. Udarbe gave us the Complex tour. They left the basement unchanged and I revisited my first urinal.

Dr. Udarbe recently bought the abandoned downtown Masonic Building, four floors of massive stone with arched entrances on either side, a block wide just off Main Street. Rumor has it he paid $1. He is now creating low-income apartments. He’s also in line to purchase the Bogert Hotel — our keystone sore thumb, Main Street, center of town, loaded with fond memories, burned out hotel, restaurant, and bar — so badly damaged no one would touch it, so beloved no one would tear it down. Currently, Holiday Inn holds rights on developing the property, but that expires this fall and if they don’t act, Udarbe vowed to step in. If he pulls this off, he will become a hero legend.

I also applaud the artists like Fritz Peters, who rescued the West End elementary school, and others who have found they can afford in-home studio space in majestic homes, churches and schools. The artist influx is in no small part influenced by Rick and Liz Boni’s successful Appalachian Art Studio. Their school has made Ridgway over the last 10 years the official Chainsaw Carving Capital of the World. Their annual Main Street event and auction brings 20,000 people to a 4,000-person town.

I applaud the many wealthy Pittsburgh families who have driven north to our woods and bought downtown vacation homes and restored them to their original splendor. They bring family and friends for extended stays because they have so many bedrooms. The town is sleepy most of the time, but it fills up during summers, social and craft events, hunting and fishing seasons and major holidays.

What’s happening is this: senior home owners are dying and their grown children already have established lives in other states, so the family homes are going on the block. Many of these historic properties likely sold for less than $100,000. The train station was $19,000.

However, buying an inexpensive 100-year-old building is no bargain. Built when coal energy was abundant and indoor plumbing didn’t exist, these houses require some burdensome and immediate retrofitting. Right off, one must redo the plumbing, heating and electrical systems. Lead piping, impromptu bathrooms, monster furnaces, leaky vents and knob-and-tube bare wiring demand it. Exterior paint and window frames are often lead-based and must be handled with tremendous care. Single-pane windows must be replaced with inoffensive dual-pane windows. Old wooden homes can lack exterior wall insulation and must be drilled and filled; without it, heating 16 rooms in winter can be costly. Basements may need Mighty Moe jacks.

An old home can cost many times the purchase price. Of course, then it’s done. It’s a one-time expense. It’s like taking some of that interest you would pay on a 30-year mortgage and putting it into a fixer you can afford for cash.

So, anyhow, I give thanks to those folks for their philanthropy and acumen at keeping my home town well, even if I’m doing so 3,000 miles away in a newspaper they likely don’t read. Cheers!

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written for The Herald for more than 25 years.