Home of 25 years sold out from under Kasson resident

By Linda Alice Dewey
Sun contributor

Debbie Ellis had no idea her life was about to change until a student at Glen Lake School, where she works in the kitchen, called out to her as he went through the lunch line this past May.

“Hey, Mrs. Ellis, did you know your house is gonna be torn down?” The boy’s father had heard it at work and passed the news along to his family.

Ellis has lived in the old stone house on the corner of Pierce and West Kasson Center Road for 25 years. “When I was married,” she explains, “my husband and I bought this house, and we owned it for (counting in her head) probably 16 years. And then my husband had lost his job, so we decided to sell; and Glen Noonan approached us and said, ‘I want to buy it and have you guys rent from me.’ So it worked out really well, because I love this house — I love living here.”

Periodically as she talks, heavy gravel trucks trundle by, turning the corner in front of her house on to go north on Pierce to its end a little ways up the road. There lies the entrance to an expansive gravel pit, the home of what used to be Kasson Sand and Gravel, which was owned and operated by the Noonan family.

Ellis says that Noonan did indicate to them that the gravel under their home was probably worth more than the house itself. Her laugh is rueful as she recalls how the gravel pit kept expanding in their direction over the years.

When she and her husband divorced, “Glen came to me, and he said, ‘I’m going to lower your rent a little bit, because you’re by yourself here now, and you have children at home.’

“I am paying $550 a month to stay here,” she reveals. “He wanted it to be affordable so I wouldn’t have to move, you know?”

She felt secure about her home after Noonan bought it until two years ago. “Well, then he passed away,” she recalls, “and I kept waiting for them to raise the rent, and they never did, thankfully.” But this May, when the boy in the lunch line tipped her off, she says, “I blew it off, thinking, ‘Oh, these kids don’t know what they’re talking about’.”

Later on though, someone else approached her about it, and she began to think about how, just the year before, the woods across Pierce Street had been cut down. When she asked the Noonan family, who had inherited the property, about it at the time, they said, “Oh, that will be five or six years before we get that close to your house. Don’t worry about it.”

Still, she began to wonder if the kid did know what he was talking about. “So I called them,” she says, referring to Roger and Beth Noonan, “and they said, ‘Debbie, you might want to come over.’

“I went down there and sat at their kitchen table,” she continues, “and they just said they had sold my home along with the rest of the gravel pit, ‘And you will have to be out of your house by May 2017’,” they told her. There were other rental properties in the deal, too — five of them — plus two properties where the tenants have life leases. She goes on to explain, “They handed me a sheet of paper, and said, ‘These people own it. This is who you contact. This is where you send your checks to.’

“We haven’t told anyone,” Roger Noonan warned Ellis, “so don’t say anything to anybody.” If that was true, Ellis wanted to know how this child at school knew about the sale. “I don’t know how they found out,” answered Noonan. “It’s a small community.”

She asked if the buyer was Elmer’s, who runs the gravel pit across Kasson Center Road, or Rieth-Riley, who had “a gravel pit way down the road.” All Noonan would say was that it was one of them.

Ellis was in shock. Her home and six others had been sold, and she hadn’t even known it was for sale. Soon, shock turned to depression.

Early in July, a letter arrived from Rieth-Riley Construction to say they had purchased the property, and that they could continue the lease on a month-to-month basis.

She came out of her daze enough this summer to begin to look for a place to live. “There is nothing out there,” she declares. “Looking for a place to live has been a nightmare. It’s like $1,500 a month to rent a place, and I still have two children at home. They’re 18 and 20, so they can’t — I can’t say, ‘See ya.’ You know? How bad would that be? It’s not like I can send them on their way. But I did let them know, ‘Wherever we find to rent, you’re going to have to get jobs and help me pay, because I can’t afford to do any more than I’m doing now.’” Her children are students at NMC. One did work full-time this summer.

Ellis doesn’t know what she will do if she is evicted. “I went to the bank, and my credit score is low because when I got divorced, I got behind,” she states.

On top of that, she has just been through a hysterectomy and resumed work this week after a three-week rest, rather than the prescribed six. She called school to let them know she can’t lift a lot, but that she can serve food and wipe counters. “I can’t pick up more than a gallon of milk,” she admits. “I should be okay. I just have to be careful. My doctor knows my situation, and she hasn’t told me I can’t.”

Just this summer, earthwork contractor Duane Newman stopped Ellis in Meijer and said, “Do you know the gravel under your home?”

“Well, I know there’s a gravel line under my home,” answered Ellis.

“The gravel under your home goes down only 25 feet.”

Ellis says that she had a contractor come in a few years ago to insulate the home as well as he could; but when it came to replacing cracked windows, he said he couldn’t do that to a historic home. “So, if you can’t fix the windows, how can you destroy the house?” she asks. The house, which is 86 years old, has not officially been designated “historic.”

As things stand now, Ellis does not know what she’s going to do. “I’ve been searching since June, and there is absolutely nothing out there except one place for $1,500. I talked to one lady who wants $700 a month for a one-bedroom upstairs apartment.” She did look at the homes going in at Maplewood Commons in Maple City, but found that, for her, they are, “not affordable for a single woman with an 18 [and] 20-year-old that could get married and leave.”