A few years ago, Waunakee’s Main Street looked tired.

A decaying section of Highway 19 took motorists past dated storefronts and elderly street lights. A few folks came to town to visit Mill House Quilts, but there wasn’t much else to see. Locals were more likely to head to Madison after the kids got off school.

“We had bad infrastructure, overhead power lines,” said Roberta Baumann, editor of the Waunakee Tribune. “It wasn’t pretty.”

In 2014, a long-awaited $4 million reconstruction led by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation ripped up a mile’s worth of Main, from Holiday Drive on the west to Division Street on the east. Crews resurfaced and rebuilt the street. They added bike lanes, improved intersections, updated street lights and installed planters.

Even before the work was done, investors began to take notice.

Village administrator Todd Schmidt estimates that little Waunakee has seen more than $18 million in new private investment and reinvestment combined in the downtown area, all during the last two years.

He compared it to “flipping a switch.”

“Not only does the economy return, but we finish this brand new street and make it something we can be proud of,” Schmidt said. “Then we start throwing at it these little creative things that draw people, like Barns on Main (a public art project).

“We’re trying to bolster downtown economy and give businesses a chance at being successful.”

About a quarter of new investment has been residential, notably a new 75-unit apartment complex at Madison and Main.

Then in mid-June, Lone Girl Brewing Company opened at 114 E. Main St., with a large main dining area, beer brewed on premise and a rooftop that seats some 100 people.

Lone Girl “is going to bring people to Waunakee in a way that few restaurants have,” Baumann said. “Friends of mine from Stoughton and Madison (say), ‘Oh, let us know when you’re going; we want to go!’ Everybody wants to see it.

“That is going to create a destination unlike any restaurant has in a long time here.”

Along with new businesses have come new events, like a family-centric Fourth of July celebration called WaunaBoom, and Live from the Park, a summer concert series. Each Tuesday evening through July 26, bands play and food carts come to the Village Park Gazebo.

There are also new public art projects. Now in its second year, Barns on Main showcases the work of local artists on 15 metal barns lining the downtown street.

With cute shops, village-centric events and a focus on creativity, Waunakee is poised to become a small town destination. Baumann can see it now, how the IPA drinkers at Lone Girl will stop at Parched Eagle Brewery and artsy shops like Millies on 2nd.

“Once people are sitting on that (Lone Girl) rooftop and they go, ‘Oh, look at that quaint little mill! Let’s go visit that!’” Baumann said. “It’s going to keep growing.”

New Girl in town

Every day, some 16,600 cars drive along East Main Street, according to a 2015 traffic study by the Wisconsin DOT.

Behind the wheels sit missed opportunities for Waunakee businesses — residents who earn $20,000 to $36,000 more each year, on average, than people in towns nearby, whose homes’ median value tops $300,000.

A commercial leakage study conducted last year reported that “Waunakee businesses seem to be capturing about 30 percent of the retail potential within the Waunakee area,” compared to 94 percent in Cottage Grove, 83 percent in McFarland and 69 percent in Oregon.

People come to Waunakee to raise children in the village’s well-regarded school district. When they go out to eat and drink, they drive to Madison.

“It’s just shocking how much this community goes elsewhere to spend its money,” said Kevin Abercrombie, a co-owner of Lone Girl Brewing Company. “These numbers were important for us to realize that this was worth the investment.”

Abercrombie owns Lone Girl with his wife, Kerry Abercrombie, and Paul and Tammi Kozlowski of Chicago, as well a group of 14 investors who own 10 percent of the business.

The brewery bills itself as “uniquely familiar.” The plan is to sell Lone Girl’s beers mostly in-house, with limited sales at bars and grocery stores designed to drive people back to the brewery.

While “sit down,” non-fast food restaurant options are consistently what Waunakeeans ask for, that’s not what Lone Girl aims to be.

“We’re a brewery with great ambiance and great food, not a restaurant that makes good beer,” Abercrombie added. “That’s something we’re trying to keep our feet on the ground with.”

Lone Girl is among the most ambitious projects Waunakee has ever seen. A nearly 7,000-square-foot main floor includes a kitchen and keg room, and the rooftop patio seats 125 people.

“Others are going to come around us,” Abercrombie said. “And that’s great. The more the merrier — we become a destination, it helps everybody.”

Lone Girl is just the latest beer-centric business to find a home in Waunakee and its sister town of Westport (Westport addresses have a Waunakee ZIP code). Octopi Brewing Company, Isaac Showaki’s contract brewery, opened in October 2015 at 1131 Uniek Drive in southwestern Waunakee.

Octopi is on track to make 12,000 barrels of beer in 2016. In short order, Showaki said, it could be one of the largest craft breweries in the state, making beer for a half dozen clients in addition to a house label called 3rd Sign. (For comparison, Ale Asylum brewed 22,734 barrels in 2015; Karben 4 planned to brew about 5,000.)

“We met with everybody,” Showaki said. “We went to Fitchburg, Monona, Cottage Grove, Madison. ...At the end of the day, Waunakee was the one who said, ‘We really want you here. What is it going to take for us to make it happen?’”

On April 30 of this year, Jim Goronson opened the doors of Parched Eagle Brewery off Highway M in Westport. Goronson calls Parched Eagle a “nano-brewery” and expects to brew 100 barrels this year. On tap in the tasting room are a wild ale, a Berliner Weisse (sour ale) and a pale ale called kölsch, among other things.

Westport, he said, “fit criteria we were looking for at the time: reasonable buildout costs, fairly reasonable rent rate,” said Goronson. “We had good visibility there.

“The population of Westport (and) Wauankee is growing. That made it attractive to us as well.”

Like Octopi which invites food carts to its tasting room, Parched Eagle focuses on beer over food — the short menu includes pretzels, meat and cheese from Stoddards market in Cottage Grove, and pre-made pizzas from Real Wisconsin Pizza Co.

Residents agree that Waunakee needs more dining establishments. A lack of food was part of what sunk Brix 340, a wine bar that opened last summer and closed a few weeks ago. The adult-only nature of the wine bar, plus a lack of outdoor seating, didn’t help either.

“It’s such a young community,” said David May, an optometrist and landlord who co-owned the wine bar. “We’ve talked to a lot of younger families that have kids, and a lot of them would rather have a bottle of wine at home on their own deck and have neighbors with kids over.”

Waunakee should soon have its own winery. Drumlin Ridge, led by David Korb, his wife Brenda and his son, Keenan, is set to open in the fall on River Road in Westport. It would include a tasting room and small plates menu as well as a crush facility.

For the past few years, David and Keenan Korb have been making wine in Edna Valley, south of San Luis Obispo, at a custom crush facility. When the winery opens they’ll have those nine wines, including pinot noir, chardonnay, syrah, a rosé of syrah, albariño and pinot gris, from California.

The ultimate goal is to make 30 percent central coast wines and 30 to 40 percent estate grown wines like marechal foch and crescent. The rest of the grapes would come from other Wisconsin vineyards.

“The whole area is really looking for it,” Korb said of his fledgling winery. “We’re looking to have small plates, sausage, cheese, crackers, breads. Wine is a sauce for food; they go together.”

Creative class

Many of Waunakee’s new businesses were lured to the area by the efforts of two people: Todd Schmidt, who serves both as village administrator and economic development director, and Don Tierney, a developer and Waunakee native.

Schmidt started leading tours for real estate brokers and developers in 2013, before Main Street had been updated. Those tours included developments created by Tierney, like Arboretum Office Park and Kilkenny Farms.

In addition to expansive homes that hover around the half-a-million dollar mark, Tierney has given Waunakee public parks and trails. His properties house banks, a childcare facilities and a karate studio. A convenience store is in the works.

After trying the brisket and ribs at a Parade of Homes party, Tierney invited the owners of the Blowin’ Smoke BBQ food cart to new construction on Montondon Avenue. That restaurant opened in January 2014.

Schmidt emphasizes the doubling in population Waunakee has seen in the past 25 years, from just over 6,000 people to 13,000 today. Tierney said he’s seen more measured growth.

“Waunakee has had a good steady growth. It’s been consistent,” Tierney said. “A community is like a log chain, it’s as good as its weakest link ... great parks, a great Main Street, some great businesses. You need it all. They all help each other.”

New businesses like Hero Vintage Co., a home decor/ gift store started in July 2014, and Gather, a public studio and guest house coming this summer, have been drawn downtown by improvements and the promise of foot traffic.

Gather, which owner Susan Gardner described as “a maker space” for things like card-making and scrapbooking, is set to open July 15.

“Our clientele will be mostly women,” said Gardner, who founded Art Party Place, popular with kids. “As I go down Main Street, it’s become ... like a sorority house. So many of us women who are maybe age 40 to 50 have decided to start our businesses now.

“Waunakee is such a supportive community. They want to support small businesses. ... How could you not want to jump on the bandwagon?”

Last October, Stephanie Agnew recreated an art shop and boutique she had in Florida at Millies on 2nd, tucked into Murphy’s Mill off Main Street.

Agnew’s main challenge is “reminding people to shop in town,” she said. “I have to remind myself too. We didn’t have a ton of options, but we’re getting more. Hopefully that will continue.

“People want where they live to be cool,” she added. “Whether it’s Waunakee or Monroe Street, if you want to keep the community vibrant and prosperous you gotta spend money there.”

The cultivation of creative businesses, highlighted in an event called Imagination Celebration, is part of why Arts Wisconsin gave Waunakee an Arts in the Community Award.

“They’ve been proactive about it, that’s why I hold them up as a model,” said Anne Katz, director of Arts Wisconsin. “Many places in Wisconsin are doing creative economy work ... but Waunakee has actually called it something, made it visible and funded it. That’s groundbreaking.”

Artists like Don Spencer, a creator of mosaic glass, and muralist Abby Wilson, have their work showing downtown as part of Barns on Main, a public art project.

Wilson made the mural inside Lone Girl’s entryway.

“It’s kind of like ‘Wizard of Oz,’” Wilson said. “In the beginning of the movie everything was gray and dull looking. The tornado hit and she came out into this colorful world. It became an opening, a renewal for Waunakee.

“Instead of people going out to Madison and the Capitol Square, they say well, we don’t have to do that.”

Spencer, 73, moved to the area 11 years ago. He’s noticed how the village has “been trying to foster creativity and arts.”

“When people in Waunakee thought about looking for art, they headed to Madison instead of looking locally,” Spencer said.

Events like Imagination Celebration, a showcase of local visual and performing arts held every year or so, show they don’t have to.

“It’s a growing population, a prosperous community, and prosperous communities have people with discretionary money to spend,” Spencer said. “At some point you don’t need another car, another boat, another television, but you can appreciate something beautiful.”

“It’s definitely becoming a lot more attractive and approachable,” Wilson agreed. “With each new event that showcases artists, you realize how many lone wolf basement dwellers were there.

“Art begets art. If there’s a little bit of art and people respond favorably to that, more art will come out. The community is becoming more accepting.”

What’s next for Waunakee? Schmidt can only say what won’t happen.

“I can tell you what you won’t see, and it’s not to pick on any other community,” Schmidt said. “But we’re not going to look like Middleton, like Fitchburg. We’re not going to look like Sun Prairie — burgeoning commercial explosions at our exterior.

“Waunakee is a residential, family community. The board and plan commission plan to see very controlled growth at a Waunakee scale, smaller developments.”

The village wants more people to stay in town to shop and entertain themselves, true. But it doesn’t make sense to ignore the resources that are already there.

In a new development south of Woodland Drive by County Road Q, for example, “we carved out this little portion to support and supplement the residential development that’s happening,” Schmidt said.

“We’re not creating a new mall to add to our regional economy or a new Greenway Station. Those exist and we can go there and enjoy them. The lines between Waunakee and other dense urban centers are not going to blur together — we’re going to be a unique, identifiable, special little place.”

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