Redfield Rebuilt Its Downtown Once Already. We Know the Kind of Houses That Came Out of It.

A fire leveled an entire block of downtown Redfield in 1900, leaving the G.A.R. Lodge as the only building still standing on its original site. The town rebuilt anyway, and today it's a small, mostly retiree community of around 800 people with — by local accounts — genuinely well-kept older homes and quiet streets. The Redfield Depot, once a stop on the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific line, now serves cyclists on the Raccoon River Valley Trail instead of trains. The Redfield Bridge, one of the longest single-span concrete bridges in the state, is the other landmark most people know the town for.

Redfield's industrial history runs through here too — the Glen-Gery brickyard supplied the brick for Kinnick Stadium's 2004-2006 renovation before closing in 2019, which tells you something about the kind of solid, well-built older housing stock a brick-and-rail town tends to leave behind.

• Updates and renovations to well-maintained older homes, common in a town with a high share of long-term owners
• Accessibility and aging-in-place modifications, given how many residents are retirees staying in the homes they've owned for decades
• General contracting for the historic downtown core rebuilt after 1900

Small, rebuilt once already, and full of houses that were built to last the first time.