A decade ago, fire destroyed a chunk of a small Minnesota downtown. Now it’s thriving again.

MADELIA, MINN. – Ryan Visher remembers well the call he got 10 years ago about the blazing fire tearing through Main Street in his hometown.

Visher, one of the first firefighters to respond, recalled praying that his business, the gift shop Hope & Faith Floral, had not been affected. But braving through almost a foot of snow dropped by a recent blizzard, Visher saw the raging flames wiping out his store — and a large chunk of downtown Madelia.

A decade after the overnight fire on Feb. 3, 2016, threatened to erase Madelia’s downtown, the city’s Main Street is thriving, with cars parked up and down the thoroughfare into the evening. While slow growth has turned into outright decline in small towns across greater Minnesota, Madelia is a place where, with some aid from the stateand a flood of donations, businesses helped each other and rebuilt.

“You can look at the end result now, 10 years later and realize that we are stronger as a result of the fire,” Visher said. “And I think it’s because of the way the community rallied together.”

Hope & Faith remains open a decade after the blaze, offering free ice cream to first responders in honor of the firefighters that night.

No deaths or injuries were reported from the 2016 fire, but it destroyed eight businesses on Main Street in Madelia, a city of about 2,400 about 25 miles from Mankato. No cause for the fire could be determined, as crews had knocked down some of the buildings during the firefight, chewing up the evidence, a State Fire Marshal investigation found.

The businesses — a hair salon, restaurant, upholstery shop, insurance office and a dentist’s office among them — were all locally owned, and that gave everyone a vested interest in staying and rebuilding, Visher said.

But after the flames were extinguished, Hernandez recalled the sight of her restaurant in ashes, the paperwork from the night before gone.

“When you lose everything in like two seconds ... you’re just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, was this meant to be? Or were we supposed to be doing this?’” Hernandez said.

Residents worried the businesses wouldn’t rebuild and would leave, which could threaten the city’s survival, said Tom Osborne, treasurer of the Madelia Community Foundation. Some, like La Plaza Fiesta, had been offered new digs by property owners out of town if they wanted to leave.

“If they leave a small town like this, they go somewhere else, they’re probably not going to come back,” Osborne said. “You know, your town might die.”

But instead the businesses decided to work together to rebuild, said Osborne, one of the founders of the recovery organization Madelia Strong.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations poured in. After after some delay, then-Gov. Mark Dayton signed a bill in 2017 with $1.7 million to replace lost city and county property tax receipts and help pay for cleanup and infrastructure replacements.

“It was really humbling to see like how this community just came together for everybody,” Hernandez said.

She said while she had offers to leave Madelia, she chose to stay.

At La Plaza on a recent weekday night, the restaurant buzzed with patrons. On the anniversary of the blaze, they celebrate with a special discount on street tacos, Hernandez said.

The Hispanic grocery store that she had been working on 10 years ago is now open. It’s in a different spot than originally envisioned — directly connected to the restaurant instead of down the street.