86-year-old historic stone house may be leveled for gravel pit expansion

By Linda Alice Dewey
Sun contributor

Kasson Township resident Debbie Ellis may lose her home of 25 years in a sale that occurred unbeknownst to her early this summer. The house of stone was built in 1930, according to Kasson Township assessor Susan Baatz, after the original home burned to the ground. Now it is in danger of being torn down to make way for an encroaching gravel operation.

Ellis and her husband purchased the home from the Noonan family in 1991. Although Ellis sold the property back to Glen Noonan when times grew hard for her family, he allowed them to stay and rent it back from him. It is the only home Ellis’s children, now 18 and 20, have ever known.

Beside the Ellis’s, a string of families have owned it going back to Oscar Barth, who is related to George Barth, owner of the property when the area was first platted in 1881. The Cherry family lived there before World War II. The Drapers lived there from 1942-52, then sold it to the Noonans.

Ellis tells how Glen Noonan would come over to sit in her kitchen and talk about the house. “He used to come up for coffee all the time and sit here and tell me how he loved this house,” she says. Noonan would reminisce about visiting his aunt who lived there when he was growing up. He even planted the apple tree that grows in front of the home today. A cardinal often shows up in that tree since he’s passed, and Ellis wonders if maybe it isn’t Glen coming to spend a little time there.

The house holds memories for many others, as well. Glen Meteer, whose great-grandfather, Kasson Freeman, settled in Kasson Township in 1861 and after whom the town was named, believes the house was built with stone from the land it on which it sits. Why does he think that? Because the land there is nothing but stone. Born in 1925, Meteer remembers sitting in the two-room schoolhouse directly across the street and staring out the window at that house. He even has a hazy early memory of men laying its stone.

Duane Newman, also of Kasson, was born in 1930 and went to Kasson School, too. “I went through the 8th grade,” he says. “The whole school, grades kindergarten through eight, was just 21, 22 kids.

“We walked to school,” he adds. The distance for him would have been a little over a mile. “My teacher was Mrs. Coleman. She lived down on 669, across from [where] Elmer’s gravel pit [is now]. She walked from there. We didn’t have buses. My sister and I would get to school, and she wasn’t there [one] morning; and I looked west, and I could see a little black mark in the road; and that was her coming in the storm.

“We split kindling,” he continues. “It was about 35 or 40 [degrees], somewhere in there—and started a fire. We had no insulated windows.

“One time, we sat around the stove — it was burning coal, and the gas came up and exploded through every crack in that stove!” Newman laughs, exclaiming, “I’ll never forget that.”

Once Newman graduated from the 8th grade, he worked his home farm. On big jobs back then, “neighbors helped neighbors,” explains Newman’s wife, Mary, who was a neighbor back then. “They had a circuit and helped each other.”

So when Lorne Draper, who lived in the stone house at the time, needed help on jobs like threshing, Newman was there to do it. “I’ve ate many meals at that house,” says Duane. “We had to take teams of horses to bring in the grain. Mr. Draper and I would put the teams in the barn at noon and feed them.”

Then they would go in the front entrance of the house for dinner. When he was finished with his meal, Newman would say, “‘Boy that was sure good meat loaf, Mr. Draper.’ I didn’t tell him I knew what it was,” he confides. What kind of meat was it? “It was junk meat — deer! They’d get one and divide it up, didn’t waste a thing.

“Those were good old times,” he adds with a laugh.