- The old building behind me in Sundance is called Old Stoney, and for years it seemed destined to face one of two terrible fates.

Then a group of Sundance volunteers led by Rocky Courchaine decided to write a different ending.

We'll learn about Old Stoney and the people trying to save it.

I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

This is "Wyoming Chronicle."

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is made possible in part by the Wyoming Humanities Council, helping Wyoming take a closer look at life through the humanities, thinkwhy.org, and by the members of the Wyoming PBS Foundation.

Thank you for your support.

- I'm Steve Peck of Wyoming PBS.

Welcome to "Wyoming Chronicle."

We're here today with Rocky Courchaine at the building in Sundance, which among other things is the Crook County Museum.

Rocky, tell us the more familiar name of the structure we're in.

- It is lovingly known as Old Stoney.

- Old Stoney, and, in fact, the old Stoney name is now incorporated as part of a project that you've been undertaking now for a long time.

Just in a nutshell, and we're gonna get into more detail, but tell us what it is you're trying to do here.

- The restoration of this building.

It was falling in disrepair back in the '80s and it really needed somebody to love it and take care of it and restore it back to the beauty that it was back in 1923.

- And you come to this from your position as what?

- I'm the museum director of the Crook County Museum.

- And when you hired on as museum director in what year?

- It was about 15 years ago.

- 15 years ago.

Did you know you were getting into a building restoration project at the time?

- No, No.

- But it's become, at least in this part of your life, your life's work essentially has it?

- Yeah, yeah, for the last 15 years.

- What was Old Stoney originally?

Why is it even here?

- In 1923, the county needed a new high school.

The original high school sat at the foot of the Sundance Mountain behind us, and they said when the wind blew, it swayed like a ship.

- Can't have that.

- Can't have that.

It was a big two-story, gorgeous, Victorian building, and they decided to build a new one.

And there were people in this community that understood the importance of education for our area back in the '20s.

There was a lot of farmers and ranchers who just wanted their kids just to become farmers and ranchers.

And the education system knew that, yeah, that's okay, but you still need an education to do this.

And there's a great quote on the top of the front door as you go out, and it pretty well explains that, you know, an education sticks with you forever.

You can build buildings, you can build, you know, great cities, but the educated mind is what stays with the person.

- This is something I've noticed across a lot of towns in Wyoming, in the years immediately following oftentimes World War I, buildings kind of like this went up in smaller communities all over the place.

And it was a sign of community pride and progress and ambition.

And then why isn't it still the high school?

- They built a new high school back in around 1945, and then they turned this building into the elementary.

- I see.

- Until '72.

- [Steve] And you attended.

- I attended second and third grade in this school.

- You did?

- Yeah.

- So you're a Sundance guy.

- I am a Sundance guy.

Actually, Beulah, but we were bused 20 miles to get here.

- I see.

- And then in about the early 1970s, ceased to be a school altogether.

- Yeah, yeah, they used it for storage and a few small offices, but not as a school anymore.

- The option that I've observed many places that a building generally like this faced, one of two options, neither of them very good, crumbling, forgotten, eyesore, or demolished.

- Yeah.

- You didn't like either of those?

- No.

- And you've told me about a group of people in town that felt the same way.

- Yeah, the Heritage Association found out that the county was gonna tear it down.

And it was a group of students that were here in the '40s, and they said, "We are not gonna lose our building."

It's a gorgeous building.

And they got together and they took the white elephant from the county and said, "We're gonna save it."

But they could never get the steam behind them to fully save it.

They fixed the broken windows so the birds and, you know, everything stayed out of it.

You know, they did what they could to preserve what they had.

- But it took a bigger effort and a bigger idea.

For example, as you've said, the Crook County Museum is here now.

Where was the Crook County Museum before it was here?

It seems it's such a great, logical place to have it, but that wasn't always true.

- No.

In '68, they formed the museum board and they put the museum in the basement of the Crook County Courthouse.

Beautiful museum.

The artifacts are always phenomenal, but we needed a venue.

Being in the basement of the courthouse, nobody thought it was worthy of them stopping.

I had a mercantile here in town.

- You did?

- I ranched most of my life, and I was on the museum board.

- You were.

- When the county decided to take us out of their budget and close the museum down.

- Is that when this first occurred to you, that we've gotta do something better than that?

- Yeah.

- There must be a better way.

- Must be a better way.

- Did your gaze immediately turn to Old Stoney at that time?

- It did.

- What was your thought process for you?

- I always said that the museum needed a venue, and what better venue than this historic, three-story, magnificent building?

It could be our crown jewel of the county.

- It was just sitting here.

- It was just sitting here.

- Okay, had the idea, then what?

What you found over 15 years, I guess the simplest, nicest way to say it, easier said than done.

- Yes.

- Take us through, because I think a lot of communities in Wyoming, I'll bring up the one where Wyoming PBS is headquartered, that's Riverton.

there were four buildings of kind of this type built in the years immediately following World War II.

Two of them still stand.

One was a three-story, brick high school building, another a multi-story elementary school building.

They're both gone.

And the building that replaced the elementary school building, torn down as well.

That seems to be almost an inevitable turn of events in the eyes of some people.

But I think a lot of communities would want to know or could learn, would you agree, from what you've learned here and it's more than you bargained for probably.

At the beginning, what were some of the challenges that you faced in reimagining this building?

- Getting the community behind us.

You know, there was a group of us that, you know, saw the potential, but there were so many stories out there of the disrepair of this building.

The foundations were bad, the stairwells were bad, the roof was bad.

Things were just falling apart.

- So one of the first things you had to do was take an honest look at it.

What did you find?

- The bones were beautiful.

- They were?

- The foundations were in great shape.

The stud walls were in great shape.

Yes, the roof was leaking.

It was starting to ruin the floors.

But we caught it in time.

- As a building, in fact, you couldn't have really done much better.

- No.

- Was the museum move, that was the seed of it?

- That was the seed of it.

But we also wanted a place for people to gather, a place for people to see the culture of our area.

Our tourism, you know, is one of our major money makers here in this county.

- Sure.

- And, you know, the cowboy culture is becoming lost.

And I thought, what an opportunity we have here to bring in the cowboy poetry, to bring in storytellers, bring in re-enactors from the Old West.

Yet, we can have meetings here.

Yet we can have cultural events, fundraisers, art shows, the list goes on, and we needed to bring that to our community.

- The bottom two floors contain the museum itself.

A lot of communities in Wyoming have local museums and are proud of them.

I know you are of this one.

And all I can say is, again, with all well-earned respect, I didn't know what I was expecting to come in, but it was less than what I saw.

And we, my videographer, Matt Wright, and I walked through it with you before we turned the cameras on.

It's really something.

- Yeah, well, I'm very proud of it.

The museum district, you know, they followed in my stupid little brain here that what I wanted, and between that and the grants from the Wyoming Business Council and the architect and, you know, it worked great.

Everything finally fell together, after, you know, 14 years, 13 years of us struggling.

- When you say getting the community behind it was the first big challenge, was that difficult?

Were you surprised that not everybody in town felt the way you did about it?

- Yeah, I was very surprised.

I was disheartened.

- What was the sentiment behind those feelings, do you think?

How was that expressed?

This is a piece of junk, it's not worth saving?

- Yeah, and the money.

- And the money.

- You know, the money was a big thing for our community, 'cause we're not a rich community.

We're a ranching community and it's just we're poor.

We don't have the oil, we don't have the coal.

We have our beauty and that's about it.

- Well, so you learn more about acquiring, locating money than you ever dreamed.

- Yeah, yeah, and learned how to beg and learned how to get what was pictured in our brains out to the public.

- Because this is not something where you can go door-to door to all the businesses in town and say, "Give me $25.

- No.

- That can do some things with that, but it took much more money than that.

Because people watching today might be looking at the room we're in from what they can see it and think, "Well, what's going on here?"

We're in the part of the building up on the top floor that isn't complete yet.

The floors below us have come to vision, so to speak, I think largely the way you intend, and I'll just say if you haven't been to it, it's just fantastic to come in, for any museum, but a town of 1,000 people, to see what you've done, make the most of the history.

You have to be pleased with how that part has gone.

- Oh, very, very.

I still come into work and just smile because it was such a process.

- The remaining processes up here on the third floor, it's largely empty now.

We're down to the stud walls, as you say, and we can see the authentic two-by-fours and two-by-sixes the way they used to be made.

What is it that you hope to accomplish on this floor?

- Pam Thompson was in our group, and she was the president of the museum district at the beginning of this.

So the ceiling will be restored back to the 1923 original.

We can have a group of bathrooms up here, so you don't have to go down to the basement floor to use the bathrooms.

We'll have a great meeting room.

We'll have a kitchen.

So anything that you...

The facilities will be here.

- And then I can see where a wall used to be there, and that portion of it was a small auditorium, is that right?

- Small auditorium, but it was also the fifth grade when it turned into the elementary.

- I see, and at the end there's a stage.

- Yeah, there are stories of the students in fifth grade having to get on that stage and recite poetry on that stage in fifth grade.

- I can well imagine, because this was the case for so many towns in Wyoming.

The school is the...

It's not just the education center, and lots of places and lots of times, it's the community center, it's the cultural center, it's the physical focal point of the whole town.

I'm assuming that was the only auditorium there was in town, too, probably.

- No, we had a commercial theater here in town.

- Really?

- Yeah, Which is crazy, 'cause that's where they held graduation.

That's where they did some of the plays that were too large for this little stage.

- Gone now?

- Yeah, yeah.

- There we go.

- There we go, yeah.

But this one's still here.

- The hope for the stage would be to have performances again or among other things?

- Performances again, cowboy poetry again, just cultural events that people don't have to drive 80 miles to go to.

- Right.

- It'll be here in Sundance.

- For those in Wyoming who don't know where Sundance is, imagine the big square.

It's the upper right hand corner.

- Northeast corner.

- Yeah, northeast corner.

We're near the border of South Dakota.

And you said that you'd been to an event in Spearfish, South Dakota, across the border, and you noticed something.

- Yeah, half of the audience was from Crook County that was there that night.

And that's when it really hit me thinking, you know, why do they have to drive 30 miles or 40 miles or 50 miles?

And it's like, why can't we do that in Sundance?

- In the 15 years, there've been many, many hurdles to cross, and you've done it again and again and again and again.

Give me an example or two of something that needed to be done and you found a way to do it so that you can move on to the next one.

You talked about the windows, I know, for example.

- Yeah, windows and the roof.

Like the windows, we sold window squares, and we had a plot of the windows, and for $3,000 you will have your family's name or your class of '72 or, you know, some memory on a plaque on those windows.

- So that bottom middle one there, I could have bought it in my name, and there's a place elsewhere in the building that you'll see you did it.

- Yeah.

- So the windows in the room we're in now are new, but they're authentic to the original in a way, right?

- Yes.

- Yes?

- [Rocky] Yeah, yeah, the State Historical Preservation, we had to go through them to get the correct style of window.

- So here's the kind of thing I'm talking about.

It's not just, hey, let's call the lumber yard and have them bring down some windows.

We're gonna do this right and get the money that we're seeking for the purpose that we're seeking it.

There's ways to do it.

- Yeah.

- And you have to.

- I mean, it's always, to do it correctly, you gotta spend a little bit more money.

And we knew that.

And that's where a lot of people, you know, they didn't like because, "Oh, you can go down to the hardware store and you can buy this and this and this."

And it's like, if we want to do this correctly and make this building last for another 200 years, you know, we gotta spend a little money.

- There's a great elevator in here now.

When we came up, hauled some of our gear up here today, you used that as an example of how you wanted to do things here and how you didn't.

Talk to us about the elevator a little bit.

- I needed to make it big enough for pianos, organs, my showcases and like caterers.

And so it's big.

It's a freight elevator, but I didn't want a plain freight elevator.

So we've got some great historic photos that are in a great collage of the whole county.

- [Steve] And you said the inspiration for it, technically speaking, came from vinyl wraps on cars.

- On vehicles, yeah, yeah.

- And that's what those are.

- Yeah, it's just a vehicle wrap that's done on the inside of an elevator.

- Something as I think relatively simple in people's minds as the staircase ended up being important to you as well as part of this larger vision of what you wanted Old Stoney to be.

- For, you know, 60, 70 years, kids ran up and down those stairs.

They creak, they've got dips in them.

The sound as you walk in, it gives people flashbacks.

They go, "God, this sounds like grandpa's house," or, "This sounds like my old school."

- [Steve] We noticed, yeah.

(Rocky laughing) That's what you wanted.

- That's what I wanted.

I wanted, you know, those senses to come alive when people walk into the building, the look of the wood like it was back in 1923, beautiful maple, beautiful fir, the reds and the blondes.

But there were six, seven coats of paint on everything.

And it took, once again, my volunteers, took them two months to strip, sand, chip.

We got down to the original layer and I don't know what they used, but the corners were about a quarter inch thick and it wouldn't sand, it wouldn't...

The stripper wouldn't touch it, and we had to get a grinder after them and grind it off 'cause it was that hard.

But it preserved them.

- And so you have the staircase that you, among other kids, ran up and down rather than what, and no offense intended, what an architect might have said, "Look, let's put a modern built to grade staircase in here and be done with it."

And that's not how you wanted to do it.

- No, no, I wanted those senses to come alive as you walked in the building.

- So this is an interesting part of Wyoming, beautiful part of Wyoming, historic part of Wyoming as well.

Tell us about the name Sundance and the courtroom that you preserved downstairs.

- You bet.

Sundance originally got its name from the Native American ritual.

But the Sundance Kid was jailed here for 18 months for stealing a horse and a gun from a rancher north of town here.

And when he was let go early on parole, he ended up being called the Sundance Kid.

- So there was a building, generally speaking, somewhat like Old Stoney that was the courthouse, but it's gone.

- Yeah.

- But it's not entirely gone because part of it is here in the museum, right?

- Yeah, yeah.

The Historical Society went in and they took the judge's bench, the chairs, the lawyer's desk, the railings- - The railings, you call that?

- Yeah.

Stair rails, and the curved railing out of the main floor of the courthouse.

- So you can go in and see, and in that courtroom was where Harry Longabaugh's trial was held.

- It was held, yeah.

He sat in one of those chairs.

Very unique to our area.

- Right.

- All the artifacts are from the county pioneer families that settled here.

So it is unique to our area.

The stories are unique to our area.

You know, we've got bear maulings, we've got, you know, scalpings, we've got, you know, everything unique to our area.

- Again, I would say that a lot of museums around Wyoming try this approach, some of them achieve it well.

If you want to know how it's done, see a fine example of how to do it, this is the place.

You mentioned earlier, going back to the nuts and bolts of what you're having to go through, you mentioned the Wyoming business council.

And you use business council resources to get a lot of this done, correct?

- Right.

- And one of the requirements is, is you have to have some commercial business in the what's the county museum building, correct?

- Correct.

- And you achieved that.

- Yes.

Yes, we've got Senator Lummis' office downstairs.

- [Steve] I see.

- We have a therapist and we have a lawyer and another political office downstairs, and also the museum gift store is down there.

- And if they want to come in and have their office here, then they have to have it in this authentic form that's not just a main street storefront.

You've gotta do it the Old Stoney way.

- [Rocky] Yeah.

(laughing) - [Steve] And you found people that were willing to do that.

- [Rocky] They were wanting it.

You know, they really wanted to be in this building.

- You went through several, a couple of different processes of approval where the business council provided, approved funding for it.

But recently there's been a change in the rules of even the business council itself, and that has thrown up another or that threw up another toe stub for you.

What happened there?

- Yeah, when they changed the rules, we no longer qualified for the grant process.

The old process was to get businesses and to provide money for buildings in communities to start businesses.

And, you know, we got the museum, we've got four offices and one retail space downstairs.

And then when we got to phase two, they- - That's this.

- This is the space here, which is our main money maker.

This is where we were going to hold plays and rent it out, you know, every weekend for weddings and presentations and corporate meetings.

And they changed the rules and we no longer qualify for that money now through the business council.

- So rather than try to reconform your entire plan to meet those rules, you got a boost from the Wyoming legislature and a powerful, influential state senator who happens to represent Crook County.

And that's Senator Ogden Driskill.

He was able to secure the amount of funding in sort of a general sense, but you educated me this morning, that doesn't mean that the check has been written and that you have the money yet.

- Right, right.

- What's going on there?

- The state does not have a group that can give that money out.

- It struck me as possibly maybe like say an oil field.

We have the pool of oil here and we've produced it, but we don't have a pipeline to get it where we need it.

And that's what you're still looking for.

- [Rocky] That's where we're at.

- I think a widely misunderstood thing about state funding, people complain and say, "Well, how come they can spend all that money on that?

But they can't do that?"

Well, because there's a statute that says they can do this.

We don't yet have the way to do that.

I know you're not a politician, an elected official.

Are you hopeful that someone's gonna find a way so that the money that has been allocated but not yet appropriated, to use the terminology, can still get to it?

- We're hoping.

This needs to be done as soon as possible.

You know, this is our money maker.

You know, we are...

Yes, the museum's beautiful.

Yes, we have the offices.

Yes, we have the retail space going right now.

But this area, the auditorium, the main cultural center of the building, is sitting here.

- And we're not talking about $10,000.

We're talking about how much?

- About 2.7 million.

- $2.7 million still.

That's what it takes.

And you've no doubt picked through the brains of a lot of people who've done similar things or portions of things that you're trying to do.

- Yeah.

- Do you find them to be helpful in that way?

- [Rocky] Yes.

- Do people come to you about this sort of thing yet?

- They do.

- They do.

- They do, yep.

- If you had to advise someone, say a museum board or a historical board or redevelopment commission, what are some lessons you've learned and what could you impart to the town 200 miles away from here who might be wanting to take on something like this?

Perseverance, I'm sure is number one.

- Yeah, don't give up.

You know, be bullheaded.

Try every avenue.

Get out there and talk to the public.

You know, the exposure, exposure, exposure, exposure is our biggest asset.

You know, don't give up.

It will happen.

Just keep pushing forward.

- Corollary to don't give up is don't settle either.

- Yeah, no.

- You're thinking big and you still are after all this time.

- Yeah, I still want this to be the jewel of Crook County.

You know, that's the way it was envisioned 15 years ago and it is getting there.

We want this to be breathtaking when you walk in.

And it'll get there.

I mean, as you notice when you walk in the front door now, the stairwells and the floors and you just...

It's just gorgeous.

- I don't mind saying, I walked back outside to get my briefcase and there were three or four visitors there taking pictures.

I immediately became a convert.

I realized I had, I said, "Have you been in there yet?"

I said, you heard me say it to them when you came out later, I said, "I can absolutely guarantee you you're gonna love it when you go in.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- And it does, you walk in the building and you smile.

- A long process for you.

It's been worth it so far.

- It has.

It has been definitely worth it.

- You've still got fire in the belly for it?

- Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.

- Yeah?

- Yeah.

We're not giving up.

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