Restoring history: Small Desert Aire chapel refurbished by volunteers, donations

DESERT AIRE — For years the tiny building in the small park next to the entrance of Desert Aire didn’t get a lot of attention. It was pretty easy to miss, hidden back among the tree branches.

It was, and is, a chapel. A small chapel, with room for about six people.

“We know there were weddings here, because we have pictures of it,” said Jan Hansen, one of the volunteers who helped refurbish it.

Carolyn Holmes, a member of the community’s governing board of directors (Desert Aire is unincorporated), said its history is a little vague. There are pictures of it at its original location, in a small park with a pond down by the Columbia River.

“What happened was, they brought it up – we’re going to guess around 1974 – they moved it up from (the original park) and brought it up to this site,” Holmes said. “And that’s where it sat until about 2020, when we started cleaning it up a little bit. We were really getting prepared for our (the development’s) 50th anniversary.”

“We suddenly discovered that we were almost 50 years old,” Hansen said.

Time had not been kind to the building. The trees surrounding it had not been trimmed, and branches were resting on the roof. Maintenance had been spotty, and at some point, probably in the 1980s, vandals attempted to set it on fire.

Desert Aire residents at the time attempted to fix some of the damage.

“They did go in and kind of repair,” Holmes said. “I think all that (interior) paneling got changed out.”

But the steeple was in bad shape, and the lights on the cross didn’t work. The pews needed repairs and the carpet had to be replaced.

So a group of volunteers got to work, starting with Holmes and Hansen.

“We went in with our buckets, and scarves on our heads, went through the spider webs. We polished all the wood down, cleaned it up,” Holmes said.

Volunteers installed carpet, a piece found in the Desert Aire business office. An employee on the maintenance crew rebuilt the pews, restoring them to their original condition. The maintenance crew also did some repairs on the building, fixed the steeple and installed new lights on the cross. Volunteers trimmed the trees so the chapel was more visible.

“Everything that we did to it was done by volunteers or we got it donated,” Holmes said. “My little motto is you don’t need it if you don’t get it donated.”

The 50th anniversary committee went looking for some history on the building, Holmes said, but documentation was lacking. They found a few photographs of the building in its original location, and a record of one wedding. When the church was reopened, a Spanish-language Bible was found on the altar. Nobody knows where the Bible came from, or how it ended up in the chapel.

The chapel was rededicated in September, one of the few things planned for the 50th anniversary celebration that actually occurred.

“It was the 50th (anniversary) that kind of spurred us on,” Hansen said.

“It definitely was the 50th, because we were going to try to bring people to Desert Aire, and we were looking for things that were going to highlight the 50 years of Desert Aire,” Holmes said.

“We really celebrated all those (historical) things around Desert Aire,” Holmes added. “We have so many new people here and it was kind of cool, because they would say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that (about Desert Aire).’”

“Well, we didn’t know,” Hansen said.

Most of the activities planned for the anniversary celebration had to be canceled, but the dedication of the chapel went on. The organizers also buried a time capsule outside the Desert Aire office, to be opened in 50 years.

Now that the chapel has been refurbished, it’s being made available for weddings, one of which is scheduled for the first week of June.

The chapel is the smallest in Grant County, at least from what Holmes found, she said. Now it’s officially the smallest in the county, by official proclamation of the Grant County Commissioners.

Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at cschweizer@columbiabasinherald.com.