Twenty-two new standard market apartments will be available this year in Fort Scott, if all goes as planned.

Shane Lamb is president of Rural Asset Management and  Rural ReDevelopment Group, De Soto, KS., and decided to take on the former Fort Scott Manor Nursing Home, 736 Heylman Street as  a redevelopment project.

He purchased the property in January 2022, which had been closed for approximately three years, intending to create 24 standard market apartments.

In a prior interview, Lamb said they didn’t receive any state or federal grants or funds. They did apply for them but did not receive any.

Work began last year on the project.

“We went drastically over budget and over time,” he said. “All our contractors were slow, winter was slow.”

“We jumped off that project to finish phase 1 of a project in Iola,” Lamb said.

Lamb said the Fort Scott project will be restarting this week.

Phase 1 of the Fort Scott project will take approximately 60 days once started. It will take six months for the whole project to be completed.

The building is approximately 20,000 square feet and has been completely gutted, and all new materials have been used.

The Fort Scott property will not be low-income apartment rentals but instead will be for the standard market, with prices for the large one-bedroom apartments at $675 to 695 per month, Lamb said.

“We focus on rural towns and rural housing,” he said in a prior interview. “Typically, we purchase nursing homes, schools, hospitals…single-use vacant properties we convert to housing.”

Lamb said he always tries to use qualified local contractors and buy materials locally.

“I always try to keep the money local,” he said. “It doesn’t work 100 percent of the time. Sometimes you can’t find local partners to meet those deadlines…because they are so busy. We do have a couple from Fort Scott, Chanute, and Iola.”

The historic building at 6th and Main Streets in Fort Scott is in the process of being restored.

The building is owned by Al and Luanna Niece and was purchased in June 2023, according to a prior interview.

Nieces Are Working to Renovate the Payne Building At 6th and Main

“It’s a total restoration of the building,” said Chase Halsey, Co-Vice President of Mid-Continental Restoration, Fort Scott.

Koehn Construction, Fredonia, is the general contractor of the project and Mid-Continental is a sub-contractor doing the masonry restoration, which includes the brick replacement, stone replacement, tuckpointing, and stripping of the building, and in addition, will be doing the new window installations, Halsey said.

Koehn Construction did the demolition of the interior and are “pouring concrete in the basement. Getting more of the fittings in. We are pouring the slab this week,” said Brandon Koehn, a manager at Koehn Construction.

Luanna Neice said she thought they were right on schedule “probably next week steele will go up on the inside.”

The building is two stories with a walk-out basement, Koehn said, and the inside had been destroyed by a fire.

Koehn said the building should be mostly complete by mid-summer.

The building will house two apartments on the second floor, an ice cream shop on the first floor, which is street level and the basement is slated to be a gentleman’s bar, according to Niece.

Al and Luanna Niece, from Blanco County, TX, purchased the dilapidated building at 6th and Main in June 2023 to renovate.

Al Niece owns Niece Equipment of Kansas and has had a plant in Fort Scott’s Industrial Park, since 2012. The company manufactures, sells, and leases water trucks, fuel/lube trucks, and water towers, according to its website.

“We fell in love with Fort Scott, the community, the downtown,” Luanna said. “We are trying to give back.”

The building was built in 1889, with A. B. Payne as the owner. It was built for apartments and a printing shop, Luanna said. The name of the building was Shultz and Paine.

One interesting fact discovered in looking at the history of the building: “The building’s owner was friends with Mark Twain,” she said. Twain was a humorist, journalist, lecturer, and novelist who died in 1910.

The Nieces plan to make two apartments on the top floor, one for themselves and one for a rental.

The street-level floor will be renovated to make an old-fashioned “soda jerk fountain and ice cream shop” with candy and “simple foods like hot dogs”, she said.

The basement will be Al’s hangout, “Like in the movie ‘Speak Easy’, a gentleman’s bar,” she said. “It will be his mancave, probably called ‘Al’s’.”

“We hope to have renderings (of the future building plans) in about a month,” Al said. They met with the builder last week and hope to be open by next summer, he said.

Koen Construction is the builder, Al said.

What attracted the Nieces was that “this building is a stand-alone one,” she said. “And it has a lot next to it, land. About 6,000-10,000 square feet.”

The Nieces also own the building that houses the Brickstreet BBQ Restaurant, the River Room Event Center, and the Healthy Bourbon County Action Team office on North National.