By MAGGIE STEHR, Bismarck Tribune

(Several photos appera in the print copy)
SIMS, ND --

His soft blue eyes looked out across the open prairie.

On the steps of his childhood church, his father's violin music floated slowly through Sig Peterson's memories.

Peterson accompanied his father on the fiddle when he turned 15, leading a bustling congregation in songs of praise.

Those days are gone, the 95-year-old man said, but not forgotten.

Sims is a ghost town now, a shadow of the brickyard and coal mines that brought the population to 1,000 in 1884. That year, Peterson's grandfather helped lay the foundation of the town's first church.

Now, more than 120 years later, Peterson came back to watch as workers restored the weathered building.

A handful of volunteers spent Friday peeling more than five layers of wallpaper and chipping mortar from the windowsill built with bricks from the old Sims brickyard.

Work began last May, when a group of church members wanted to prevent time from erasing the memory of the Sims Scandinavian Lutheran Church.

"The church was so important for a town," said Joel Johnson, president of the Sims Historical Society and coordinator of the restoration project. "It was the first thing you built after your homestead. It's important to preserve that memory."

The church members applied for a grant from Preservation North Dakota and received $5,000 in the group's Prairie Churches project. Preservation members volunteered about five days last year on the church, and plan to work more this year, said Dale Bentley, executive director of the organization.

Volunteers have put in more than 750 hours, Johnson said. No one is really sure when restoration will be complete.

"It takes time," Bentley said. "There is a lot of history in this building. It's like a book, only very well illustrated."

Once exterior work is complete -- including stabilization of the shifting foundation -- volunteers will restore the parsonage to its Victorian simplicity.

Johnson has begun collecting old church records and artifacts from locals who still remember stories from the town's golden years.

Addie Thiede traveled from Bismarck on Friday to work at the church where she was baptized more than 50 years ago. She chipped away old wallpaper in the parsonage's parlor, reminded of Bible school lessons and her mother's organ music, she said.

Each room was ornately decorated -- dark purple grapes and large flowers splashed the walls, and intricate doilies cover the furniture. Volunteers have completely restored a first-floor bedroom with original four-poster bed and dressers and replications of the original wallpaper.

In that room, the parsonage's mystery begins.

The Gray Lady story dates back to between 1916 and 1918. The wife of Rev. L.D. Dordal, she died in her sleep sometime during his short service at the church. Dordal quickly replaced his wife, whose name is lost from any church record books.

She remains only the subject of ghost stories -- locals say she lingers in the parsonage, playing the organ and turning on lights.

Although Johnson has never seen evidence of the Gray Lady, he refuses to be inside the old building at night.

Johnson still attends services at the church next to the parsonage. The white, wooden doors open every other Sunday, welcoming some 50 worshippers from the countryside and nearby Almont.

But before the "new" church opened in the 1890s, homesteaders and townspeople gathered in the parsonage. They climbed the narrow, winding staircase to a small upper-level room to pray and sing under the rafters. The pastor's living quarters occupied the first floor.

Pastors wheeled in hog troughs for kneeling benches -- but the cramped attic sometimes forced worshippers, in wool coats and heavy dresses, to stand the entire service.

The last pastor left the parsonage in the '40s, and the building has been empty since 1984.

Empty of life, but not of memory.

Just ask Sig Peterson.

"All we have left here is our history," Peterson said as a gentle breeze swept across the prairie.

For more information on preservation efforts at the parsonage, call Preservation North Dakota at 361-9657.

(Reach reporter Maggie Stehr at 250-8261 or maggie@bismarcktribune.net.)