A rich life on the poor farm

Thirty years ago, a young Brian Frink painted a rose for Wilbur Neushwander when she graduated from high school. That's all it took to convince her to date him.

Eighteen years later, he found it much harder to convince Neushwander, by then his wife, that they should buy the massive, dilapidated former Blue Earth County Poor Farm just south of Mankato.

At the time, the couple were living in a Cape Cod-style home in a "nice little neighborhood" in west Mankato, said Neushwander, 51, a playwright and community organizer for Arc of Minnesota Southwest.

In that nice little neighborhood, Frink, 53, an art professor at Minnesota State University, Mankato and a painter with a penchant for large canvases, had to paint in the two-car garage. "I didn't want to be a painter just working in his garage. I wanted to be a painter," Frink said.

He took his argument to France. Driving around the French countryside in 1998, "he kept telling me the poor farm would look like one of those chateaus or farmhouses," said Neushwander. True, it was built in the 1870s, but the poor farm wasn't exactly chateau-like when Frink ambushed her the night before their trip, arranging to "just stop by on the way to Target."

"I had to step on a box to look in the window," Neushwander said of her first peek inside. "I saw a dark tunnel and a stairway leading to more darkness. And a smell -- musty, earthy and organic."

Still, Neushwander turned out to be game.

She had followed Frink to the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York City's Brooklyn borough in the early 1980s, working as a nurse while Frink painted and worked construction jobs for cash. Of the time and place Frink said, "It was a hard, abrasive life, really awful," but their 2,000-square-foot warehouse loft could be constantly rearranged, something the art-loving couple both liked.

The Poor Farm -- all 9,000 square feet of it -- offered plenty of space to play with and to display art. "The creative aspect of me knew this was what had to be," Neushwander said.

But it didn't make it any easier.

"I had to change my way of thinking about how I imagined a home for children," Neushwander said. "You know, nice neighborhood, park around the corner."

Poor conditions

Though it was 1998, a time of alternative mortgage options, there was no precedent for poor-farm financing. The Frinks first bought the building and 4 acres on a contract-for-deed.

Their children -- son Blake, then 15, and daughter Annakeiko, 11 -- weren't as keen on the move.

"They did not want us ever to use the words 'poor farm,'" Neushwander said.

To make it worse, when they were leaving their Cape Cod for the last time, the former Blue Earth county coroner came by and reminisced about the many deaths he'd certified at the poor farm. That scared the kids, but for Frink and Neushwander it wasn't nearly as terrifying as the work ahead.

The entire upstairs of the poor farm was cut into 11 rooms, each about 8 by 8 feet, each with a fireplace. (A total of 11 chimneys had to be removed.) The upstairs bathroom had three old toilets and a dirty shower.

On the first floor was what Neushwander described as "a bachelor kitchen" (read: fridge and microwave) plus various musty, paneled social rooms left from when the place was the Oak Grove Retirement Home. In the basement, the foundation was crumbling. ("I'm still tuck-pointing," said Frink.) There was rubble everywhere, the windows leaked and the structure had no insulation.

Send in the artists

The family lived in the house during the 10-year renovation, hanging old maps and Frink's paintings to cover up studs. They slept in every part of the house, moving from room to room as construction progressed. Annakeiko and her friends once painted a tiny room pink and called it a "dance room." Blake took an unheated room in the farthest corner of the house as a teenage lair, until winter pushed him out.

According to Frink, the reinvention of the poor farm went like this: "I would do drawings of each room and Wilbur would say, 'I don't get it' and then I would go back and do it again."

In the spirit of history, with an eye to recycling and on a limited budget, they salvaged as much as they could.

A rotating crew of Frink's art students and carpenter friends helped. "One day I came home from a wedding and there was a big hole in the roof," Neushwander said. Frink and his art students had been struck with inspiration for a "look-up" gallery in the hallway.

Only once did they call an engineer. And that was after they had removed some load-bearing walls. "We called to ask about putting I-beams in, but he never called back so we just went with it," Frink said.

Today, the first and second levels are fully renovated -- and filled with art from Frink and friends. Along with the kitchen, dining and living rooms, there are three bedroom suites, three bathrooms, two large offices and Frink's 2,000-square-foot painting studio. More gallery and performance space is planned for the basement.

"As an artist, you have to make your scene the best you can wherever you're at," Frink said.

The poor farm has become quite the scene: It's a regular venue to show artists' work and host fundraisers, performances and visiting scholars. An MFA student just finished her novel there. And both Annakeiko and Blake were married there.

"We changed the energy of the place," said Frink. "For many people, it was the end of the road. Now it is a place of art and aesthetics, a place of progress."

Stephanie Wilbur Ash is a writer in Minneapolis.