Greg Benson, Gowrie fire chief and former manager of the Macke Motors dealership, opened Beek Street Antiques about eight months ago, in a building that had once been an eyesore on the dealership property.

Just down the road, the 110-year-old building that hosted the Gowrie News for generations has been renovated, and is now both the Liberty Market and Addison James Fashion Boutique.

Across Market Street, the “gifts” of Patti’s Quilting and Gifts has become the Picket Fence, owned by Renee Fevold. Patti Anderson still has her quilting shop in half of the building.

And one old business, Jamboree Foods, has a new owner this year — Nick Graham, who is eager to continue providing the town with access to fresh food.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
General Manager Aaron Bradley explains how vacuum-wrapping the fresh meet at Jamboree Foods helps it stay good longer on the shelf. Bradley cuts the meat himself at the Gowrie store, which has a new owner this year.

“Nick’s been very positive, very supportive,” said store General Manager Aaron Bradley. “And he’s very knowledgeable. … This is his eighth store.”

Graham’s stores are in Manson, Rockwell City, Manning, Rolfe, Ackley, Jewell, and Rockwell (near Mason City), Bradley said. Graham also helps manage the community-owned grocery stores in Dayton and Stratford.

Bradley currently lives in Stratford, but has been assistant manager at the Gowrie Jamboree for seven years now, getting a promotion after former owner/manager Jeff Petersen sold the store.

“I managed the Stratford center for four years, and helped get it open Jan. 15, 2009,” Bradley said.

Gowrie is full of possibilities, he said, and he plans on relocating here.

-Messenger photo by Joe Sutter
The building that’s now the Liberty Market and Addison James clothing boutique was once Gowrie’s post office, many years ago. Marcie Boerner kept these bars on the windows as she was restoring the historic office.

“I’m optimistic enough to move to town, if that says anything,” he said. “I’ve been in Stratford for 18 years.”

Bradley is an EMT with the Southwest Webster Ambulance Service, based in Gowrie, and also the Stratford Fire Department. He’s been running the Stratford Bluegrass Festival for about 10 years, and has served on the Stratford City Council.

Now that he’s moving to Gowrie, he said he’ll probably become more active in his new town.

The members of the Gowrie Development Commission has been good to the grocery store.

“They’ve all been very supportive,” Bradley said. “Anything we need help with they try to do.”

This year, three downtown markets were held on Market Street, the main road for downtown businesses.

“Those were very popular,” Bradley said. “I know they’re planning to do it again but maybe earlier in the year, in the summertime.

“There were 40- to 50 vendors, I think. We plan on being more active with that our next go-around. We’ll serve some kind of food or do something — smoke some meat maybe.”

Over at the antique store, Benson was a fan of those markets as well.

“I did some good business on those nights,” Benson said. “It was fun, they blocked the streets and had a lot of street vendors.”

Benson bought the shop back when he owned the car dealership, basically, because it was an eyesore, he said.

“I owned everything south of it,” he said. “I didn’t like this falling-down building by my property.

“I found out it cost about as much to tear it down as it would to remodel it.”

Benson’s family has been in the antiques business for some time, both selling them and curating their own private collections.

“My mother had an antique store in the dealership, in the corner of the showroom for years,” Benson said. “And I had a lot of antiques because I had an antique store also in the building, and I also had a booth in the mall in Story City for about three years. So we had a lot of antiques already priced and packed away. I thought, I might as well get them out.”

His parents had quite the collection of china and glassware, Benson said. He himself once had a collection of more than 100 cameras — he’s since sold that down a bit. He also collects level-wind fishing reels, and wooden lures — like the Lazy Ike lures that were manufactured in Fort Dodge for years.

“People tell me, ‘My grandma used to paint those,'” he said.

His grandfather was a barber. The shop also hosts shaving mugs and other oddities.

“I just like stuff that everybody doesn’t have,” Benson said.

That includes a baby walker that’s probably from the 1800s — with porcelain wheels and leather suspension.

“And I can’t find anything like it on the internet. Nobody knows what it’s worth because there’s nothing like it,” he said.

An old radio in the shop has plugs for both 110 volt — ordinary househould current — and 6-volt DC.

“It was about time they were bringing electricity to the farm, so if you didn’t have electricity it would run on a 6-volt battery,” Benson said. “I had a guy in here the other day who was telling me, he said after supper his dad would go out to the car, pull the battery out, hook it up to the radio, and they’d listen to the news on WHO out of Des Moines — of course it was all AM radio back then — they’d listen to the news, and then he’d carry the battery back out to the car, and they would all go to bed. That was their entertainment for the night.

“I plugged it in. It works. I got WHO on it.

“My friend says, every good antique has a story. If you don’t know one, make one up.”

The building on the corner of Beek and Market streets certainly has stories behind it.

“The floor is still original. We were able to keep some of the character of the building,” said Marcie Boerner, owner of Liberty Market.

The building was the Gowrie News and print shop for generations, she said. Her scrapbook of work done on the building shows the printing press that was still upstairs.

Boerner took on the building in July 2017, and had plenty of work to do.

“There was a lot of cleaning out, upgrading certain features, rearranging things. It took longer than we expected,” Boerner said, “but then in April of this year, we had just the front part open, and I was doing occasional weekends.”

The building was starting to deteriorate before she started, Boerner said.

“It was at the point where, it was a good point to catch it and fix it,” she said. “If it continues to deteriorate, at what point is it too far gone?

“I had two goals when I got in here. That was to take the building and upgrade it so that it is viable for the future. There’s so many buildings in so many rural small communities that are just deteriorating. This one still had character and had a lot of opportunity.”

She didn’t just want to upgrade the building — she wanted something to put in it.

“I wanted to put a business in it. I live here, I work here. I’m on the GDC,” she said. “I just wanted to do something here in the community.”

Boerner partnered with Jacci Hindt, who opened the Addison James clothing botique in the upstairs of the building. Things “really got going” when Hindt moved in in October, and the shop is now open open every weekend; Thursday night, Friday, and Saturday, Boerner said.

“It’s nice to have something here in Gowrie that people can come and visit, but now that we have multiple stores with Beek Street Collectibles, and the Picket Fence across the street, we can start drawing people into Gowrie, and make a name for us that way,” she said.

Renee Fevold runs the Picket Fence. It’s at a good location, she said.

“I used to have a shop down the street by the same name,” Fevold said. “I closed that five years ago, and then I opened here in October.”

Fevold purchased the gift shop side from Patti Anderson, who opened the quilts and gifts shop in 2017 after Heartland Bank left the building for its new location.

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