YALE, Iowa, September 19, 2010 – A project that Raccoon River Valley Trail advocates believed would become a real icon among trail users – a total renovation and reopening of a 120-year-old small hotel here – is undergoing a major change.

Owner Sarah Brewster, who bought the old hotel in 2006 and who with her parents has been doing much of the renovation work, said this weekend she has decided not to finish the project where it has been happening in the business district of the town of 287 people.

Instead, the building will be carefully lifted and then moved about one mile north and just east of Yale, to the farmstead of her fiancé Tom Smith.  She said they are scheduling the big move for November, to the location at 150^th & Utopia, which are gravel roads.

They plan to use the hotel building as their own residence, but also to complete the renovation plans and operate it as a bed & breakfast, one that will certainly market to trail users.  Smith’s farmland there does not stretch all the way west to the RRVT, although Brewster said they’d be interested in buying enough land to make that a possibility in years to come. 

Sarah Brewster is shown here in front of the old Windsor Hotel in Yale, soon after she bought the hotel in the summer of 2006. The work was just beginning inside to remove decades of old records, correspondence, books and clothes.

She estimated that right now, the renovation work on the hotel is “about 45 percent complete,” and that it will probably require “about two years to complete.”  She said that’s likely when the couple will marry – at the hotel – and open for B&B guests.

In the meantime, Smith will redevelop the corner lot where the hotel has stood in the business district, using it for expansion of his own growing company, Smith Engine Repair & Tire Service.  This is located straight west across Main Street from the hotel.

Underlying all this, and helping ease some understandable disappointment among Yale folks and trail supporters, is a fun, almost amazing love story.

Brewster, 40, is a native of West Des Moines and a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa.  She taught a year in the Kansas City area while she finished up her six-year enlistment in the Iowa Air National Guard, in which she reached the rank of staff sergeant.  She then began 12 years of teaching English as a Second Language at international schools in Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore, Ukraine and Venezuela.

She said it was just as she was tiring of teaching in other countries, that she became aware of the hotel opportunity in little Yale on the RRVT.  Her parents Ron and Joyce Brewster, then of West Des Moines, had spotted news stories about it.  After doing lots of checking on it – but without ever seeing it herself – Sarah sent word from overseas for her parents to purchase the old Windsor Hotel for her.  She said then she planned to follow her long-held dream of running a small, classic inn that would be decorated with her collections from her world travels.

Here is another front view of the hotel, right before Sarah Brewster bought it in 2006. Note the snow fence on the north side of the hotel, which was there to try to keep vandals and varmints out of the building, as well as to warn of a questionable sidewalk there.

She had never married.

“So, here I was a single gal coming to a very small town to take over the old hotel I’d bought,” she said. “For years, I’d been looking for a nice husband in places all around the world.  I always thought I’d find just the right guy, but never did.  Then I move to this tiny town of Yale, Iowa, and I find him right across the street!  When Tom and I tell that to people, they can hardly believe it.  And we still are kind of surprised by it, too.”

After going together for more than three years – a time when Smith made a trip or two to Venezuela to see Brewster when she was in her final years of teaching there – they became engaged this past July.  Smith is a native of Yale, who was married earlier.

Since she moved back to the U.S. about three years ago, Brewster has been teaching ESL to fourth and fifth graders in the Perry Community Schools.  She has been living in an apartment she set up within the hotel in Yale, even as the work on it continued.

Her parents Ron and Joyce Brewster have lived at the hotel part-time while they did much of the construction work.  Both are very handy carpenters and builders who have renovated whole houses before.  While they were around Yale, they became enthralled with a three-story Victorian home located southwest of town on Iowa Highway 4.  The owner was planning on tearing it down, to make room for a new home, but the Brewster parents acquired it and, in early 2007, had it moved to a lot two to three miles north of Diamondhead Lake, southeast of Panora, where their renovation work on it continues now.

Here is how the hotel looked in August, 2007, after a new roof had been installed, and the interior of the building had been cleared, gutted and then cleaned. The new gray exterior paint had also been added.

“Tom and I talked a lot about the hotel after we got engaged,” Sarah Brewster said.  “We both love the building, and we love living in it.  But Tom right away said he did not want to live in it where it’s located now, right across the street from his business.  He said if we lived there, he’d be getting calls at all hours of the day or night from people needing engine or tire help.  He already has some of that.

“We decided the best solution would be to move-away the old house out at his farm, then move the hotel out there.  Once we do that, it will first be our house, but then also be a B&B that will be a nice place to stay, and a place where we can share with whoever’s interested the things from all my experiences and travels through the years.”

She has said it will likely have three or four guest rooms.  And there will be more room for more extensive gardens and landscaping, she added.

The hotel had not operated as an actual overnight accommodation since sometime in the 1930s, searches of its records indicate.  The Wiedman family had owned it since 1913, and the parents and two or three of their children lived out their lives in the building without ever really altering it – except for operating a grocery for a time in the 1950s in what had been the original hotel dining room.  To read our earlier story on the hotel’s history, Sarah Brewster purchase of it, you can click here.  To read an earlier story, with photos, of what the hotel was like when it was offered for sale, click here. 

Here Yale hotel owner Sarah Brewster was running a snack stop for cyclists in the two-day “Tour the Raccoon” ride between the Des Moines area and Jefferson in June of 2009.

Brewster said this weekend that, as word has spread around the community about her new plans for the hotel, she hasn’t heard disappointment as much as “surprise.”

“I know some feel like, ‘Well, part of our little historical district is leaving,’ but I tell them, ‘You know, really, if an outsider hadn’t come in and saved it, it’d have been gone a long time ago,’ ” she said. “They understand that, and they also understand that Tom wants to use the lot in town for his own business, which is a really good local company that is busy and does need more space.  The people here see all the trucks coming in and out of here all the time to go to his place.”

Yale has several other amenities that have great potential for trail-related activities and attractions.  The local restaurant and bar, Just Ethel’s, is already very popular with RRVT users.  A brand new Yale Community Building was completed last year, and is ideal for large meals or gatherings.  The classic, round Yale Gym is undergoing a total renovation – more funds are needed – and it will eventually be an ideal spot for concerts, live theater, dances, reunions and other gathering, even basketball.  There is a nice little camping area near the RRVT trailhead on the south edge of town, and although it has no shower, it does have flush toilets.

Here is the Windsor Hotel soon after it was built and opened in 1890. (Photo from the Guthrie County Historical Village.)