This old house is still standing

The deadline has come and gone, but one of the oldest houses in Bloomington still stands.

The John Brown house is an 1865 wood farmhouse built by an English immigrant who fought for the 1st Minnesota Regiment during the Civil War. April 1 was the deadline for people who want to save the house to apply for historic status to the National Register of Historic Places.

If that wasn't done, the Bloomington City Council said last fall, the house's owner could tear it down.

No application for historic status has been submitted. But this week, an official with Bethany International, the nondenominational Christian college that owns the house, said he is in no rush to tear it down.

"There's no bulldozer parked on campus, waiting," said Tim Freeman, Bethany's executive vice president. "As a staff, we have a ton of initiatives we're working on this spring and we're not doing anything with this right now."

Larry Granger of the Bloomington Historical Society said the society is working with Brown's descendants to gather more information about the house and the Brown and Ames families who lived there. Brown, a farmer, was a constable in the pioneer town and fought at the Battle of Gettysburg. Brown's out-of-state descendants came forward after they heard the house was endangered, Granger said.

He said he has learned that the Brown-Ames family was involved in building the Dan Patch railroad as well as the mansion that the famous racehorse's owner, Marion Savage, built in Bloomington.

"It's taken awhile to pull it all together, but now we're on a fast track," he said. The society will give Freeman regular reports on its findings, he said.

A photo taken in the early 1900s shows a simple but imposing two-story home with a wrap-around porch with fancy trim. Today the porch is gone, the roof is sagging and the white paint is peeling badly. The house was willed to Bethany decades ago and is occupied by a college employee.

Last year, neighbors complained to the city that peeling paint made the old house unsightly. When the college sought to repaint the structure, it discovered that lead paint abatement made the job extremely expensive. Freeman said he has since been contacted by people and companies that claim they can do the work safely but more cheaply.

"It's still too cold to do that," Freeman said. "We find ourselves in an interesting position. Yes, we can do whatever we want with the building. ... But the house is occupied by an employee, and we have no use for this piece of property right now.

"So I'm in a wait-and-see mode. When the weather gets warmer, we'll see."