Over those 6 months, Brent undertook a number of projects: he’s reworked the bunk house into a place for people to stay in, cleaned up and restored the former garage-turned-chapel, transformed a shed into a simple and cozy writer’s retreat, and turned the general store into a museum to exhibit all the cool things he found onsite.

His most important project thus far is restoring the town’s water supply system. The town has a 900-foot-deep mine shaft with a hoist from the 1800s. He teamed up with some of the more distant locals and went down 700 feet to find the spring used for the water supply. They replaced the pump, restored over 500 feet of piping, and now the town has running water for the first time in almost 15 years.