Overbrook, Kansas – In the beginning, Ken Krause dreamed of a stone barn, nothing more, as he worked selling dental supplies. “Driving around Kansas I’d see these rock barns. I’d visualize, fantasize about what I could do with rock buildings,” he says.

 

Fantasy steered toward reality when a newspaper ad led to a barn he could call his own: built in 1909, with 22-inch walls and filled with manure. A 140-acre farm came attached. Over the course of three decades, Ken’s dream expanded to include seven cascading ponds, an array of “profit centers,” and an elegant barn home that doubled as a bed and breakfast.

 

Today, at 80, Ken is about ready to retire from the farming game in favor of leisure time, summer vacations and less responsibility.

 

“It’s time,” he says. From his cheerful sunroom, Ken looks out on rows of fruit trees zapped by an untimely spring freeze. Apples, cherries, peaches, pears, all lost for the season. Only the blackberries survived.

 

Yet his eyes twinkle as he talks of Fieldstone, a place where he made his dreams come true.

 

Lessons and ideas

 

Before Fieldstone, before the barn, there were valuable lessons to be learned. Ken graduated from high school in Kansas City, Missouri, at the age of 16, enlisted in the Army and served in Germany during World War II. On his return, he studied at the University of Missouri, then began selling dental equipment for the family business.

 

“I wasn’t doing well. I was 22, 23, just a kid,” he says. Established dentists weren’t interested in what Ken had to sell, so when a customer steered him toward a nearby dental school, he made a beeline. He opened a student store. Not only did he sell dental supplies, he scouted towns for suitable practices, designed their office spaces and sometimes even found them patients. “I was really doing well,” Ken says.

 

He rose to head Krause Dental Supply, and then sold it to Boston-based Healthco International, staying on as regional vice-president until he retired. On the farm, his managerial and architectural experience would be reemployed in a more personal way.

 

It started with the barn. Ken acquired his prized possession in 1977 when an advertisement in the Kansas City Star led him to Overbrook, some 60 miles from his suburban Leawood home. It was love at first sight, Ken says. “I bought a barn, and they threw in the farm.”

 

He named it Fieldstone, for the rocky land from which it sprang.

 

He initially envisioned a weekend retreat and, as he plunged into renovations, those years of drawing plans for dental offices proved handy. Ken sketched in a three-room apartment for one side of the barn, leaving the rest of the structure for chickens and hay. He and his first wife, Marilyn, would drive over on days off from their jobs, their dream of a rural respite well under way.