Legacy Rudyard building torn down, new community center to come

The old J & J Grocery Store building, previously Sanvik's, in Rudyard was torn down Tuesday after standing empty since 2004 to make way for the Rudyard Community Center, a multi-purpose event space for the local community.

Plans for the new building are being finalized. The project is being paid for with a grant given to the Rudyard Historical Society, which bought the land and helped tear down the building which had been deemed unsafe after two decades of little use.

Rudyard Historical Society member Dan Redding said the building had multiple feet of standing water in the basement and had become generally unsafe, so tearing it down was needed, but they still want to honor the long history and legacy of the building in the new community center.

Before the main building was torn down, members of the society removed the old, painted-over signs on the side of the building, vowing to restore them and put them up in the new building.

Redding also said they collected bricks from the original building which they are going to use for fundraisers, selling them to patrons who will be able to have their names put on them to be installed in the new structure, immortalizing them as contributors to the community center.

And the building now lost did have a long and storied history.

J & J Grocery, known for decades on the Hi-Line as Sanvik & Sons, later Sanvik Bros., closed in 2004, which the Havre Daily News at the time called the end of an era.

The building's last owners, Jack and Jane Rhodes moved to Rudyard in 1975, but after years of declining business combined with their increasingly busy lives outside the business, the pair decided to close, the end of a grand tradition in the eyes of many at the time.

The building was a gathering place as well as a store, with coffee club meetings every day and an atmosphere many were sad to see go back in the mid-2000s.

The building's history as a major store began in 1928 when Ole Sanvik bought the place and turned it into a mainstay that would bring people to it from across the Hi-Line, including Havre, for their appliances, groceries, propane, dry goods and hardware, and to use the coin-operated laundry.

When Ole Sanvik retired, the business was passed down to Selmer Sanvik, who was later joined by brother Robert Sanvik, becoming Sanvik Bros. until the Rhodes family bought it in the mid '80s.

Tuesday, a small crowd gathered to bid the building farewell as workers, mostly volunteers, salvaged the last few artifacts worth keeping from the building before the building came down.

It was the end of an era for the remains of a legacy business and huge part of Rudyard's history, but with the promise of a new beginning in store for its future.