Going to the chapel and gonna get married

Tim and Susan Schafer of Adair have cultivated over time a love for putting their small community of Adair on the map. They’ve especially done this since they opened two barn wedding venues in their area.

The Schafer Century Barn sits northwest of Adair in Guthrie County on the family’s farm. The Schafer Barn on the Hill, which is a new version of that old barn and includes many modern amenities while still keeping a rustic feel alive, sits on the north edge of the town of Adair.

In addition to the two barns, the Schafers purchased an old church to revitalize recently: the former St. John’s Lutheran Church near Adair. They hope they can breathe new life into the formerly vibrant congregation’s house of worship by offering it as an additional, more traditional wedding venue.

St. John’s was built in 1927. It’s nearly identical to the Immanuel Lutheran Church that was located in Adair until this winter, when it was torn down. Both congregations ceased holding Sunday worship services last year.

“St. John’s, the second one to be built, had some significant improvements to it from the one they built in town. Structurally, it was a lot better building also,” Tim Schafer said.

Schafer said St. John’s was miraculously built in a very short amount of time. It was first drawn up in December 1926, work began in March, five days later bricks were being laid, and nine weeks after the project began, it was complete.

“It’s a big brick church with stained glass windows, a big, beautiful pipe organ, ornate woodworking, a big bell tower,” Schafer said. “It was a really vibrant congregation until the last couple of decades when population in rural Iowa declined. These churches are getting torn down in numbers.”

Saving a perfectly good church building and keeping it useful for generations to come is the reason the Schafers bought St. John’s, which they’re calling the St. John’s Country Wedding Chapel. The Schafers have couples already booked to tie the knot in the space, which the Schafers say can comfortably seat 220 people.

Barns

The church compliments the two barns the Schafers own. One is over a century old and the other is just seven years old.

Tim’s dream was for he and Susan to be the next generation to call his family’s homestead their own. He and Susan were able to live there for 20 years, and on that property, is a barn built in 1915.

In 2014, when Tim and Susan were making arrangements to pass the farm on to the next generation and move to town, Tim decided to rebuild that century barn from the ground up.

“I rebuilt that barn and was just building it as a hobby barn where my boy could have six to 12 cows, then at the end of the year we’d grass feed them and butcher them ourselves. As I was building that barn in 2015, my two oldest kids got engaged and wanted to get married at home — something simple. This barn that I was rebuilding, they made the comment that it looked like a big church,” Schafer said. “We hurried up and got it done in time for my daughter’s wedding. We had no electricity, no permanent lighting. We ran extension cords to it and had fans. I think we had about 190 people there. It was the most rustic wedding. We had a violinist and it really felt like you were going to a wedding in the early 1900s.”

The Schafers had yet another family wedding a short time later and another one not long after that.

“A week before my son’s wedding, my youngest cousin got engaged, so in a six-week period, we had three family weddings,” Schafer said. “It was really fun to attend my cousin’s wedding because it was the only wedding I didn’t have to do anything.”

Tim remembers that after that cousin’s wedding, he and Susan were bombarded with couples who wanted to get married in the barn.

After two years perfecting the Century Barn and over 100 weddings there, listening to feedback from the families who had used the property for their weddings, the Schafers started the Barn on the Hill in 2017.

In building the Barn on the Hill, Schafer again took a building intended for livestock and built it into a wedding venue, but this time, it was on a much larger scale.

“I put a big, massive timber frame barn on the back of it that really overwhelmed this relatively modern, ugly little barn that we had built. We built bathrooms, bars — there are three different permanent bar areas in here and there’s a fourth portable bar area — a bridal suite complete with beds and a hot tub that’s all private for the wedding party to get ready,” Schafer said. “[The front half] of the building is all climate controlled and the back half it is what people are looking for: a big timber frame barn. There is literally 650,000 pounds of lumber in that room.”

On their 20-acre campus in Adair, the Schafers can house approximately 30 people in on-campus lodging. Camp sites are available for people to utilize on campus, too. The Schafers even own rental properties in Adair that they allow people to stay in if necessary.

“The families that come in Wednesday or Thursday, especially with these weddings, they’re a lot more elaborate, they’re staying here, doing the rehearsal Friday, the wedding’s generally Saturday, then Sunday they come in, open gifts, pick up the venue, eat some leftover food,” Schafer said. “This building works great for big parties and isn’t as weather-contingent as other barns would be.”

The Schafer Century can be found on social media by searching on Facebook for Schafer Century Barn - Venue.

Schafer reports that providing all the amenities for getting married and bringing people to the small town of Adair are both rewarding parts of his family’s endeavors.

“I’ve been in a lot of businesses where people appreciate the services we offer, but the wedding venue business is completely different because the people who are coming here are having one of the best days of their life. They are on a cloud from the time they get engaged, they come look at the barn, and they’re giggly and their whole family’s giggly, beaming with happiness. The day the wedding comes is such an important day for the guests, and it’s so unusual to have a facility that at the end of the day, it’s just a big ‘ol barn. But to see people bring that kind of love into a space like this and see that week after week, it’s really rewarding to be a small part of that.”