At the corner of a country crossroad sits an old wooden structure. It's named the Little Stranger Church.
The church opened its doors in 1868 to its congregation and for the next 50 years served as a site of succor for those living on the prairie and farmlands of this corner of northeastern Kansas.
Then the Spanish Flu. The state board of health ordered all public meeting places closed. And congregants never returned. It was 1919.
The building closed "and then it kind of fizzled out and they did not reopen after that," says Tara Sloan. "For a lot of people, they thought that was the demise of the church.”
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A decade after closing the doors, long after the influenza pandemic had passed, a local 4-H group saw the old building as a perfect place to perform a play.
Sloan says the group "had to clean it all up, kind of gut it, get new stuff in there, do a lot of work to get it up and running. That’s how it started getting used as an event and community space."
And over time, one of the oldest wooden structures in Kansas had life as community event space. And then time moved on. The building was abandoned.
More decades later, the Little Stranger Church and its adjoining cemetery is now its own non-profit with a goal of bringing the property once again back to life. Tara Sloan is one of the board members.
“The final goal really is to restore it for historical preservation, it’s kind of an icon in the area," says Sloan. "Also, we want to reopen it and let the community be able to use the space again.”
The restoration process has been underway for six years. in 2015, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
And in March of 2020 the Little Stranger Church was awarded a $90,000 Heritage Trust Fund grant from the Kansas Historical Society.
Those funds will go toward installing new doors, restoring the windows and siding, and painting the building, says Sloan.
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But now here we are again. Another pandemic. 100 years after the church first closed.
“It’s not going to happen again. We have momentum right now. I think having an online presence through Facebook and through our website makes a big difference too.”
If all goes as planned, Sloan says the doors of Little Stranger Church will open to the public once again some time in the next year.