131-year-old Chaska house starts its journey toward new home

One of Chaska's oldest houses recently finished the first leg of its journey from where it was built more than 130 years ago.

The Ernst/Riedele House was hoisted off its site in the middle of Firemen's Park, which is undergoing an ambitious redevelopment. For now, the cream-colored brick house is sitting at the far end of a parking lot at the park.

Late this summer, the house will make a longer journey to its new home at a now-vacant site in Chaska's Walnut Street Historic District.

"That second leg will be much more complicated," said Matt Thein, co-owner of Thein Moving Co. of Clara City, Minn. The house will travel about three blocks on County Road 61 before turning off onto Walnut and moving another four blocks to the new site. The move will be done "in the dead of night," Thein said, to minimize the disruption to other traffic.

The condition of the old house has presented challenges in moving it, Thein said. "It's an extremely fragile structure, like most you would find of that age," he said. To protect it, the structure was wrapped in huge chains before it was hoisted off its old foundation.

The house is named for Andreas Riedele, a German immigrant who came to Minnesota in 1855 and went into the brickmaking business in Chaska in 1881. He built the house adjacent to the brickmaking operation in 1884. It was occupied by two generations of his family and eventually passed to different owners when they acquired Riedele's firm.

Earlier this year, the City Council approved spending $242,000 on the move. Building the new foundation and restoring it on the new site will cost an additional $75,000. The house most recently had commercial space on its ground floor and an apartment on the second floor. The city plans to restore the house for that same use and hopes to recoup some of the relocation cost by selling or leasing it after it is moved. City officials have said they believe the house could be sold for about $200,000.

Matt Thein and his cousin Tim Thein are great-grandsons of Eugene Thein, who founded the moving company in 1892. Matt, 40, began helping out as a youngster and has been actively involved in running the business for about 20 years.

Thein said most of his company's business comes from moving structures in the Willmar area. Jobs in the Twin Cities area like the one in Chaska frequently involve moving older, historically significant buildings. Last year the company moved a historic three-story home in Rochester to make way for an 83-unit apartment complex near that city's downtown.

Susan Feyder • 612-673-1723