Methodist Episcopalian Church building located on Railroad Avenue N. in Leonard, North Dakota. Photo by Jan Russell.

It was a piece of history that Ginny Kistler Tupa couldn’t let go. And, yes, it’s personal. 

“I know there are people who think I’m crazy,” Tupa laughed, speaking from her home in Grand Forks. “But I couldn’t let it happen.”

“It” is the Methodist Episcopalian Church building located on Railroad Avenue N. in Leonard, North Dakota. The church, built in 1887, closed in 1995 because of declining membership. Tupa, whose family had worshiped three for generations, couldn’t watch the building just fall apart.

She owns the building and is slowly restoring it, hoping to get it listed on the National Register of Hisotric Places.

“It’s certainly a step-by-step process,” Tupa said.

Work started over the past year, with Tupa overseeing the preplacement of the roof and siding. Because of the hope of placing on the National Register, Tupa is limited in options for the building.

“I couldn’t update the sideing to anyting more than what it was originally,” Tupa said. “I have to keep the wood.”

Tupa has many memories of her childhood and adolescence in Leonard, and the church figures prominently in those. She was baptized and confirmed in the small building and some of her sisters were married there.

“I remember Vacation Bible Schools that we had there,” Tupa said. “We’d take cardboard boxes and use them to slide down the hills. There were just scads of kids in those days and we socialized a lot in events around the church.”

It’s been a challenge to restore the church and bring it into modern building codes. In replacing the siding, workers ran into asbestos, which had to be carefully removed. Tupa is hoping to find local sources to restore the stained-glass windows and rehang the pendant light fixtures and is hoping to buy back some of those too.

The church building and land are closed tied to Mary and Edgerton Watts, early residents of Leonard. The Watts Free Library, built in 1911, and registered on the National Register of Historic Places, was built by Watts in memory of his wife, who died unexpectedly at age 54. Mart Hewitt Watts came to the area from New York and taught school for three years. She staked a homestead before her marriage and she and her husband donated much of the land on which Leonard was built.

“I can’t replicate everything in the church,” Tupa said. “But it will eventually come back close to what it was.”

Tupa hopes the bulding could be used as meeting space.

“It doesn’t matter, really, as long as it’s used. We can’t just let everything slide into history and get torn down.”