In Pawnee City and other towns, old churches get new lives as businesses

PAWNEE CITY — The old church on the corner of Ninth and G streets isn't a church anymore, but it's still a sacred place.

At least it is to Marie Glenn.

It's a place where she can indulge in her favorite hobby: sewing. It's a place where she's surrounded by her favorite colors, where a fountain gurgles in the background, just audible above Glenn's favorite Christian music CDs.

Six months ago, Glenn transformed the former Baptist church into Heavenly Treasures Inc., a fabric, craft and quilting supply store.

By doing so, Glenn is preserving a piece of Pawnee City's history, as well as a piece of her own.

Glenn grew up in Pawnee City. The 100-year-old church that now houses her business was once where she and her family worshipped on Sunday mornings.

But the church's congregation dwindled over the years, and finally, about three years ago, closed.

Glenn, who at that time had recently moved back to Pawnee City after spending most of her adult life elsewhere, didn't want to see her old church empty. She didn't want the building to fall into disrepair.

So she and her husband, Steve, bought the building and turned it in into a business.

"When we moved back down here, the goal was to help the community," she said.

That means Heavenly Treasures is more than just a fabric store. Glenn also carries socks, underwear and towels — things you can't find elsewhere in Pawnee City. She keeps a few gift items in stock, as well as packages of Christian-themed greeting cards and holiday decorations.

"We try not to compete with any other business in town," she said.

But mostly, her business is fabric. Bolts of brightly colored cloth fill three church pews, as well as a baby crib and shelves along the church's angled walls. Glenn likes bright colors, she said, so that's what she sells. And anyway, the bright cloth looks nice with the stained-glass windows.

That's the way it usually is with fabric stores, she said.

"The fabrics reflect the owners," she said.

Heavenly Treasures is, in fact, one of two old churches in Pawnee City that recently have been reincarnated as something else.

Just a few blocks away from where Glenn sews quilt blocks and sells fabric, Bill and Elsie Sunneberg display their expansive collection of antique pedal cars at a United Presbyterian Church-turned-museum they call the Pedal Clinic.

In Brownville, old churches house a theater and concert hall, and another is being converted to an art gallery.

An old Syracuse church is a museum. One in Adams is a library and, until recently, one in Wahoo housed an antique store.

In Syracuse, the museum society cares for the church. The church and two other buildings, in turn, provide space for the society to display scenes from the city's past, including equipment from an old butcher shop in town, old newspapers, a hat collection and a big game collection, among other things.

Rose Garey, treasurer of the museum, said it was as important to preserve the church as it was to care for the artifacts inside.

A few years ago, she said, a family in town for their father's funeral asked if they could visit the museum. When Garey met them there, she realized that the man who died was a Syracuse native who had attended that church when he was a boy.

"He had grown up in that church, he had been married in that church, and they wanted to toll the bell for him," she said.

They did, she said, 80-some times, one toll for each year of his life. Then they looked around to learn more about the town where their father had grown up.

The church has been closed now since the 1960s or '70s, she said. Fewer and fewer former parishioners stop in. A lot of the visitors are Boy Scout troops, school groups and history buffs.

Still, she said, the church is especially important for those who used to attend Sunday services there.

"It brings back a lot of memories for a lot of the old-timers," she said.

Glenn can relate.

On a visit to her old church before she bought it, she found a choir robe with her name embroidered on it, one she had worn as a girl.

She remembered going to church with her grandmother, who was a longtime member there. She remembered learning to sew from her other grandmother, who didn't belong to that church but did own the fabric store in Pawnee City.

As much as the building is a part of the town's past, it's also starting to look like it could be an important part of the town's future, said Joe Davis, president of the Pawnee City Chamber of Commerce.

Davis, who works at a funeral home across the street from Heavenly Treasures, said that since the store opened, he's noticed cars from Kansas, Iowa and Missouri, as well as Southeast Nebraska.

"Personally speaking, as far as just being able to look out the front door and see that the building is being maintained … it's been great," he said.

The Pedal Clinic, he said, has drawn out-of-town visitors, too.

The museum, which has been open for about a year and a half, has had visitors from three countries and across the United States, Elsie Sunneberg said.

She likes welcoming new people to town, she said, especially if they visit other businesses in town or stay for a meal.

They don't charge admission for the museum, though they do accept donations, she said. Mostly, she said, the Pedal Clinic is for themselves.

Bill Sunneberg restored his first pedal tractor — a John Deere from the 1950s that had belonged to their sons — around 20 years ago, after he ran across it in a ditch.

Only the steering wheel was sticking out.

Bill Sunneberg dug the little tractor out of the dirt, cleaned, repaired and painted it.

He like the way it looked, so he decided he could fix others, too.

"I thought, ‘Well, if I have one, I might as well have two,'" Bill Sunneberg said.

Now he has 450.

"It wasn't supposed to end up like this," he said.

After he and Elsie retired from dairy farming, Bill Sunneberg had more time to devote to his new hobby. He started going to auctions in search of old pedal cars. Sometimes people brought them to him.

As his collection grew, he said, he decided that he needed a place to store it. That's when he and Elsie bought the church, which had also previously been used as a doctor's office.

The couple, along with their children and grandchildren, spent hours tearing up old carpet, repairing ceilings and restoring the building to look, once again, like a church.

The building needed a lot of repairs, Elsie Sunneberg said. It took a lot of work.

"People thought we were crazy," she said.

But the museum, at least for Bill, helps keep him sane.

He needed a hobby, he said.

"I'm glad I got one, because I don't know what I'd have done after I quit milking," he said.

It's obvious, Davis said, that for both Glenn and the Sunnebergs, their old churches are more than just businesses.

"It's a labor of love," he said.

Reach Cara Pesek at 473-7361 or cpesek@journalstar.com.