Flip or Flop

One of the most recognizable faces of our day in Orient is giving one of the town’s most landmark buildings a much needed face-lift, and the project is almost at the finish line.

Ryan Frederick, a real estate agent, owner of Frederick Real Estate Services and a community leader in many senses of the phrase, bought the bank building just over two years ago in hopes of flipping it into something great again.

The building will be on display for an open house Friday, July 26, from 4 to 8 p.m. The Adair County Pork Producers will be making supper and live music will be performed during the event.

The building, completed in 1894, was the First State Bank of Adair County, then Farmers and Merchants Bank, until that moved a few blocks away in the 1990s. More recently, the building was home to the Orient Bank of Memories, which has since moved to the Adair County Historical Museum in Greenfield.

“The building kind of sat here. I was poking around one day and decided I needed an office space — I was tired of meeting clients in my living room,” Frederick said.

Frederick walked into the bank, which sits on First Street just west of South Broad Street, and took a look at what it might take to upgrade the building to a usable, modern condition. One thing he found was that above a false ceiling there is an ornate medal ceiling he could still use if he were to buy the building.

“I got the wise idea that I oughta own this building. That was 25 months ago,” Frederick said. “We went through the motions, got it bought. Had I known then what I know now, I’m not sure I would’ve done that, but all things being equal, it turned out.”

Frederick said that features to the building like the false ceiling were the result of someone coming in, probably in the 1970s, and modernizing it to their liking. That, as a result, took away much of the historical value of the building. When he began working on the remodel, he was conscious of bringing back some of the structure’s character.

Off to the left upon entering the structure is Frederick’s office, which was once the bank manager’s office. Outside of that, there is a large room with an added bathroom and exterior door on the north side of the building that exits to the alley that Frederick added.

On the northwest corner of the building is the original vault. Frederick estimates that the door to the vault weighs well over a ton. The railroad tracks traveled through Orient across the street and south of the bank, which meant that in Frederick’s estimation, it took “really big horses and some really big dudes” to move the vault door from a train into where it has now been for the last 125 years.

On the front of the building are new windows and new lights, which Frederick says should brighten an already updated block that he says Orient should be proud of.

His bank building, for instance, was built when Orient was just 12 years ago and the railroad had only been going through town for 20 years.

Frederick says that the bank was built in a time when architecture and taking pride in something you built meant a little more than it might to some now.

“There’s something about these old buildings. They come from a time when architecture was important. We think about that and it’s pretty amazing,” Frederick said. “They built this and spent some money on this. You look at the front of this and somebody with some talent laid the brick on the front of this thing. Somebody with some talent built this ceiling. They didn’t just throw up four walls, say it’s a box and we can do business in it now. They had some pride and spent some money making it awesome, and they did. Sometimes I think we dwell too much on doing things quickly and cheaply. These buildings are from a time when we thought about things differently.”