Volunteers will begin restoring the the Hutmacher House next month. (Preservation North Dakota)

Imagine building a house entirely out of your own surroundings. Now imagine that your surroundings are the Great Northern Plains of North Dakota. That's no easy task.

But that didn't stop the Hutmacher family from using local clay, stone, and timber to create their home and surrounding barns in Fayette, N.D. in 1928. Now, the so-called Hutmacher complex is the best remaining example of stone-slab architecture in the state and the focal point of a major preservation effort.

Preservation North Dakota, a statewide partner of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, acquired the National Register-listed property last March and has given itself a two-year deadline to stabilize the main farmhouse and rebuild its earthen roof. What is to be done with the rest of the site, which includes a poultry barn, kitchen house, stable, and the ruins of a barn, is still up in the air.

"We are in the planning stages,"says Executive Director Dale Bentley, who visited the site last week and hopes to have the first organized volunteer work done in mid-July. "We are exploring all of our options."

Bentley indicated that experiential tourism is a strong possibility for the site.

"The setting is striking, and it's a prime candidate for experiential tourism," Bentley says. "We want people to be involved in the restoration process."

That process began back in 1979, when the Hutmachers sold their property to local resident Steve Burian, who wanted to make sure the complex was well preserved. Both the Dunn County Historical Society and State Historical Society of North Dakota tried to help manage the site, but their resources were minimal. Last year Burian's son, Arnold Burian, donated the property to Preservation North Dakota.

Preservation North Dakota is using a $98,000 grant from Save America's Treasures, which is a public-private partnership between the National Park Service and the National Trust, coupled with local fundraisers and the help of local preservation societies to begin its own restoration effort.

The stone-slab structures on the property are prized because they represent a unique architectural technique brought over by the German-speaking Russian immigrants that flooded North Dakota in the early 20th century. The Hutmacher complex also represents an economical and sustainable way of living that is rarely seen today.

"To realize what was happening across the nation in 1928 with cars, the radio, indoor plumbing, etc., and to take materials from your own site and live the life they did fascinates me beyond belief," Bentley says.

The Hutmachers were almost entirely self-sufficient. Not only was their complex built from local materials harvested on-site, such as Badlands cedar, sandstone, straw, and puddle clay, but they also mined their own coal to heat the house and took water from a local creek.

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