Scott Cooney, a Rattlesnake resident who is looking to develop his own subdivison in the valley, has put down $5,000 in earnest money on the old building. Cooney has had an interest in preserving the school for years, and recently found himself aligned with a blossoming neighborhood group with the same goal.
“Unknown to me, they were working and meeting on the same thing,” Cooney said Tuesday. “We've gotten together and it's now progressed to where we have a buy-sell on the school and two other lots.”
“We'd been meeting for two or three weeks when Scott arrived,” Hoem said Wednesday. “We'd had a lot of ideas about what to do with the building, but we hadn't made it far in finding a way to actually buy it. He'd been thinking the same thing, and he was able to make it happen.”
The Lincoln School, built in 1914, was most recently a church, but has since been sold to the R.C. Hobbs Co., which planned to build 12 homes on the property. The school itself has been up for sale as a single-family home or duplex.
The school was priced at $500,000 - Cooney made an offer that included the building and two adjacent lots. Cooney and the seller then went through a period of counteroffers to reach a buy-sell agreement.
Cooney said he put down $5,000 and that the agreement calls for another $20,000 payment by March 21. The rest of the money - $500,000 - would need to be paid by mid-May.
“I think we'd like to have all the money there by then, rather than deal with some sort of financing situation,” Cooney said. “What we really need is some sort of endowment that could step in to help us fund the place over the long haul.”
That or 500 people with $1,000 each. Whatever works, Hoem said.
“Nothing happens without money,” he said. “It's a lot of people spending a little money, or a few people spending a lot of money. Or a combination. It doesn't make any difference to us, but we need to get after it.”
The neighborhood group, along with Preserve Historic Missoula, wants more than anything to get the building back in more public hands. Over the long haul, Hoem said the Rattlesnake group would like to see it used as a cultural center that would house a wide variety of uses, from neighborhood meetings to arts education to writers' retreats.
“It's a unique building, and we don't have a lot of buildings like that,” Hoem said. “We'd like to have a way to use it that would be constructive for not just the Rattlesnake but for the rest of Missoula, as well.”
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@ missoulian.com.
Save the school
If you'd like to take part in the effort to save the Lincoln School in the Rattlesnake, call Harold Hoem at 327-1290 or Doug Hacker at 728-2905.
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