YALE, Iowa, July 7, 2006 — The 116-year-old, wood-frame former Windsor Hotel on Main Street in this west central Iowa town has been sold this week to a 36-year-old Iowan, a career teacher in overseas schools who has long dreamed of owning and operating her own bed and breakfast or small inn. 

Sarah Brewster now hopes to make that dream come true with the old hotel in Yale, pop. 387, where the 56-mile-long Raccoon River Valley Trail passes through town one block east of her building. 

The hotel, after a renovation project that could stretch three years or longer, will also cater to users of Springbrook State Park five miles to the west, Lake Panorama five miles south and other visitors to the area. 

Brewster is purchasing the hotel for an undisclosed price from George Ohm, 70, a former Yale mayor who was given the building in the 2003 estate settlement for Kenny Wiedman, the last member of the family that owned the hotel for 87 years. Wiedman, who had made the hotel his residence for decades, died in 2000. Ohm had checked in on Wiedman frequently through the 1990s when he was in declining health. 

The building is in rough shape now, but it likely wouldn’t still be standing had Ohm not secured it against vandals, rodents and the worst ravages of harsh weather. 

Clean-up at the property begins this weekend, the new owner said. She said she also hopes “to have at least some electrical service installed this weekend,” and then will ask Fort Dodge roofing contractor Mike McCarville to put a new roof on the hotel as soon as possible. 

McCarville, sales manager of RoJohn Home Improvement, Inc., based in Fort Dodge, said the company would do the roofing job at the hotel “at cost” as “our contribution to a project that will be good for the whole area.” A former mayor of Fort Dodge, he became interested last winter after reading about the hotel in a story on the news and opinion site Offenburger.com on the Internet. 

Brewster said she also has arranged to rent a vacant lot, owned by the Farnhamville Cooperative on the quarter-block east of the hotel, for eventual development into beautiful gardens. She said she views that as an important enhancement of the hotel’s grounds. 

She has been very busy on the project, since arriving back in Iowa June 25 for a month-long vacation from her previous teaching assignment in Kiev, Ukraine. She will be assisted by her parents, Ron and Joyce Brewster, of West Des Moines, who have done extensive building renovation projects before. They will be doing most of the construction work. 

Sarah Brewster will be in Iowa another three weeks before she travels to Caracas, Venezuela, to begin a two-year teaching assignment there, “but now I definitely know where I’ll be spending all my vacations and breaks the next couple of years,” she said on Friday. 

“I’m thrilled and maybe a little scared at having this opportunity in Yale, but I think it will be a great project.” 

She said she has “really wanted to do this kind of thing since about 2000, when I was teaching in Singapore. I was doing a lot of traveling then, staying in and seeing many different kinds of small hotels and hostels. I started thinking, you know, it’d be neat to find the right place and then pull together all the best things I’ve seen in small hotels all over the world. So my plan in Yale will be that we’ll not only have a lot of historical touches about the hotel and the community, I’ll also use my personal collections of things from around the world to give it kind of an international flair, too.”

The Windsor Hotel was built in 1890, probably by the railroad that once operated on the right-of-way that is now the Raccoon River Valley Trail. The Wiedmans, who were grocers in Yale, bought it in 1913 and operated it as a hotel only for another couple of decades. It had 10 or 12 guest rooms on the second story, only one of them apparently heated, and all sharing a bathroom. It apparently was also a long-term boarding house for a time. By the 1950s, the Wiedman parents had passed away, and thereafter Kenny Wiedman and his siblings used the hotel primarily as their residence. They operated a small grocery in it, in the 1950s, in what had once been the hotel’s dining room.

Officials of the new Raccoon River Valley Trail Association, which acts like a Chamber of Commerce encouraging developments along the trail, are thrilled with news of the purchase. 

“Hopefully, this is one of the first of a whole lot of new projects happening along the trail,” said Carla Offenburger, the RRVTA president. “It’s obviously a big step by Sarah Brewster, so the rest of us should rally around her and her family, and help them as we can.” 

Mike Carey, vice-president of the Farmers State Bank in Yale, which helped finance the purchase, said some people around the community had given up hope of any redevelopment ever happening in the old hotel, but not all had. 

“I’d say about half saw it as an eyesore, and half saw it as a possibility,” Carey said. 

He is also now serving as president of Midwest Partnership, the regional economic development association serving Guthrie, Greene and Adair Counties. “Getting that hotel renovated and operating again is going to have a positive impact on this whole area,” Carey said. 

“And you know what, I don’t think we could have found a better, more well-rounded person than Sarah Brewster to take this on. With her international experience and connections, I can see her turning that into a really interesting and different place to stay. That’s what will draw customers from Des Moines and other places all over the Midwest. People aren’t going to come get overnight rooms in a place like Yale just to have a place to sleep. They want to stay in a place that has a story to it, where it’s an experience. That’s what Sarah can bring to this project.” 

Sarah Brewster graduated from Valley High School in West Des Moines in 1988. She went on to the University of Northern Iowa, where she earned her degree in Spanish and then started her career as a teacher. 

She taught a year in Kansas City while she was finishing up a six-year enlistment in the Iowa Air National Guard, in which she rose to the rank of staff sergeant. 

Then she began teaching English as a Second Language, as well as Spanish, in international schools. Those have been in Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore and then Ukraine.

Her father Ron Brewster retired after 32 years with John Deere in the Des Moines area, and now he is spending full-time in his life-long hobby of woodworking and building renovations. “My dad’s work is like art, it’s so good,” Sarah said. 

Joyce Brewster, a retired office worker, now works part-time in the cafeteria of the Waukee school where her grandchildren are enrolled, but “she’s also a good construction worker,” Sarah said. 

Ron and Joyce most recently undertook the total renovation of an old convent located in the old residential section of West Des Moines, and turned it into a gorgeous, three-story home where they now reside. Now as they undertake the Yale hotel renovation, they expect that the first step, after the clean-up of the building, will be constructing a temporary living quarters for themselves on the ground floor. 

It will be a humble beginning. But a lot of great projects start out that way.

– Chuck Offenburger

Article Published: 07-07-2006