After years of work, northern Minnesota community celebrates restored city hall

For more than 80 years, City Hall in Bigfork has been at the heart of that northern Minnesota community. It houses the city offices and local VFW post, and has hosted weddings, funerals, school dances and other community events.

Now, after a brush with possible demolition and years of hard work to secure donations and grants, the historic structure with its distinctive fieldstone facade is restored and ready for the next eight decades.

"We didn't know what we were getting into," when the effort to save the building was launched in 2011, said Mike Kocian, chairman of Bigfork Improvement Group. "But we knew that we had to save the building. We were determined to do that."

The structure was built by local craftsmen in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression; it was the Bigfork Village Hall back then.

While the building was well-used over the years, Kocian said it started to deteriorate. The roof and foundation leaked, and the heating system was outdated. In 2011, the City Council discussed the possibility of tearing down the building and replacing it with a steel structure.

"Because of years of deferred maintenance, some thought that the building was not worth saving — but fortunately, many more people decided that it was," he said.

That launched a yearslong effort to stabilize and then restore the building.

The Bigfork Improvement Group raised money to temporarily patch the roof, and VFW Post 1764 donated money for a new HVAC system.

Meanwhile, Kocian and others worked to secure grants from the Minnesota Historical Society, the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board and the Blandin Foundation, among others.

"It takes time. You have to have serious community support before they'll fund (a project) because they want to make sure that you're for real, and that you have the community behind you," he said.

And the community came through.

"We had spaghetti suppers, a booth at our Wilderness Day, dances and other events. ... People even handed me money on the street. So we knew that we had the support that we needed locally, from our community, to push this forward," Kocian said.

Getting the building listed on the National Register of Historic Places also helped secure funding.

The restoration work included extensive exterior and interior work — new roof, doors and windows; removing false ceilings; new lighting; new birch flooring; commercial kitchen appliances to use for events; and accessibility improvements, among other work.

The work "gave us a historical look but with modern-day finishes to ensure continued use into the future," Kocian said.

It all officially debuted on June 8, during the city's Wilderness Day celebration and coinciding with an all-class reunion. The response, Kocian said, was "incredible. ... just overwhelming. People loved it."

Adding up all the grants, monetary donations and in-kind donations of services, the project budget neared $900,000. And there were the eight years of work to see the restoration through to completion. But Kocian said it was well worth it.

"A lot of times it's easier to tear a building down. But there was so much history," he said.

"Eight years is a long time for us to work on this project. It's hard to keep people engaged. But we had a great group of people and we were very fortunate. ... Everything I've heard has been just overwhelmingly positive. It just means so much to a community to have this history."