Grief brought her back to western Minnesota. Now she’s helping restore her hometown 

In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”

Kris Shelstad had a plan. Life was good. She’d retired after 30 years in the military, living with her husband in a beautiful home with a pool near Austin, Texas.

Then her world turned upside down when her husband Rick died unexpectedly in 2018. 

Two years later she moved back to her hometown of Madison, which sits just below that bump in Minnesota’s western border. It was a place where she had family roots and emotional support.

“Bought a big old house and thought I was just going to be this crazy old lady in a big old house in my hometown,” she recalled.

But about six months later she started getting antsy. “I needed to do something because I was grieving, and I felt like if I didn’t put my energy somewhere positive, it was going to turn somewhere negative,” she said.

So she bought a 15,000-foot vacant concrete block building near downtown that had been a lumber yard and hardware store.

“It was going to be a coffee house and art gallery, but then community members came in and said, ‘Hey, you should do this,’ and ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if we had that,’” Shelstad recalled. “And we just said yes to everything, and when I say we, I mean me and my dog Chopper.” 

She knew all about strategic planning from her work in the Army, but she went into this venture with no plan. “We said we’re just gonna just let the community reveal itself.”

The Bible study group buys a furnace

The reveal is still happening four years later as people help fill needs in the community and the operation — the Madison Mercantile — continues to expand.

There’s a recycling program operating in a storage space and an expanding community garden out back.

Shelstad, 61, wrote grant proposals and gathered enough funding to remodel the building.  Finding sustainable funding is the biggest challenge and the thing that keeps her up at night. A retired lieutenant colonel in the National Guard, she gets a military pension and so she works at the Merc for free, which allows the coffee shop to break even.

Shortly after the Madison Mercantile opened in February 2021, she began to understand how much the community of about 1,500 wanted this venture to succeed.

“A men’s Bible study was meeting. They didn’t want to heat the church out in the country, so they thought they’d meet here, and they heard me talking with the HVAC guy about the furnace just limping along and maybe we can make it through the winter,” Shelstad recalled.

“Well, then they took up a collection that day and then they went and shook down some of their friends too, so the Garfield men’s Bible study bought us a new furnace.”

The Merc, as it’s affectionately known here, also gets funding from the city. In exchange for providing economic educational resources, mentorship and training for startup businesses, the city pays $1,150 a month, money that helps cover the cost of heat and electricity.

The coffee shop is a for-profit venture. Everything else happening here is part of a nonprofit organization.

The Merc has become a staple of life in Madison, said the Rev. Jack Nordick, a retired Catholic priest.

“I’ve been amazed at how it has improved over the first time I went here and I looked and I said, ooh, this is kind of a dingy hole,” he said. “They’ve really, really put work and effort into it and made it something that’s really good for the community.”

‘Swear an oath to my community’

These days, the Madison Mercantile hums and Shelstad is the power source.

On a recent Thursday afternoon a 12-year-old practiced her guitar, a couple who relocated here from Washington, D.C., to work remotely stopped for a coffee break, and Dawn Quame, a local pastor, worked at her laptop.  

“For me it is nice to have a place where I kind of feel the sense of belonging,” said Quame, who serves three small Lutheran churches and is chaplain at the Madison Healthcare Services center.

“You can work in a church 40 hours a week, and unless you’re out in the community you really don’t see people,” she said.

She typically spends Thursdays at the Merc, starting the day with a Bible study and staying to work on her sermon and visit with people passing through. 

David Roth is visiting with several friends around a table. He likes the live music that happens at the Merc. It’s different from the bar scene.

“This place has just been a tremendous place for gathering, so many different, diverse groups that come in and use the facility, and it’s just been great for a lot of things,” he said. “It’s been a great asset to our community.” 

In one room there are public computers, there’s a Zoom room for virtual meeting and a room with wheelchairs and walkers that people can borrow.

There’s a partially finished commercial kitchen intended to support local food producers. A federal grant to pay for the remodel was recently cut, putting that project on hold.

Shelstad is confident she’ll find a way to make it happen, but maybe not this year. She said she gets calls from community leaders in other towns who’ve noticed what’s happening in Madison and want to reproduce it.

Shelstad thrives on the social interaction and exchange of ideas happening here, despite the long hours and the stress of juggling finances.

This work also serves as a healing balm for her grief.

“I don’t have time to feel sorry for myself,” she said. “It’s easy to kind of go inward, stay away from people after you have a loss in life. And I found that getting out there and being of service and just being with people and having people depend on me got me over that.” 

She feels creating something that helps build community is a calling.

“I think when you have lived a life of service in the military, you don‘t know what to do with yourself afterwards,” she said.

“We swear an oath to the Constitution and the ideal that that is important,” she said.

“Now at this stage in life, I kind of swear an oath to my community that we’re going to continue moving forward and doing things that help our community thrive and grow and be a welcoming place for new people, while still being a place of comfort to the people who have always lived here.”

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