REDWOOD FALLS, MINN. – Not every small Minnesota town has a bookstore.
But then, not every small town has a Joni Ogdie.
When I first met Ogdie, or Mrs. N, as she is still known to a generation of her former high school chemistry and physics students, she was vacuuming a cavernous empty building next to Chapter Two, the bookstore she opened in downtown Redwood Falls in 2021.
She had bought the adjacent building to expand her bookstore and had just finished sanding 2,500 square feet of hardwood floor to save herself the exorbitant cost of hiring a professional. She’d never refinished a floor before but Ogdie, 65, is not averse to taking on challenges that would deter plenty of others.
“When I said I was going to start a bookstore, people said, ‘Are you dumb? Who’s going to come in?’” she recalled.
The naysayers had a point. Not only were rural downtowns designed for the trade habits of 125 years ago, but until recently, bookstores seemed doomed to fall before an onslaught of online sellers and e-books. The way of the future seemed to be digital, not bookstores in late 19th- or early 20th-century buildings.
But Ogdie was taken with the idea of what downtown Redwood Falls could do for her. And what she could do for it.
You see, the downtown area was struggling with too many vacant storefronts. And Ogdie had her own struggles. In 2006, her beautiful 18-year-old daughter Mandy Nieland, a college freshman who wanted to become a pediatric transplant surgeon, was killed in a snowmobile crash. In 2019, her husband, Jim Nieland, an engineer who loved camping, fishing and holding babies, died of liver disease.