Shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun, Libby Sebesta surveyed the dozen piles of fire-blackened wreckage that were once the Wilson Opera House, looking for anything she could recognize.

Sebesta, 81, pointed her foot to a thin piece of water-soaked wood with two thumb holes.

“That’s a door from the kitchen steam table,” she said.

On a mission aimed at rebuilding the historic 1901 building that was destroyed in a Nov. 6, 2009, fire, Wilson community volunteers have launched Phase I of a three-phase plan by sifting their way through the rubble of the Opera House in search of salvageable items.

Gordon Zahradnik, rural Lyons, a Wilson native with “pure Czech genealogy” on both his mother’s and father’s sides, has volunteered to lead the group dedicated to building on the same site.

As a part of the cleanup, he arranged for the rubble to be unloaded in a nearby pasture so volunteers could sift through it using pitchforks and rakes. He compared their task to an archaeological dig.

The final load was delivered to the site within the last few weeks.

“I knew if it went to a landfill, it would be gone forever,” Zahradnik said.

In their first forays through the ashes, volunteers have recovered a collection of metal and glass pieces: a German saber and helmet; a toy tin truck; a white bowl with the initials of a lodge group; and, more recently, a bank bag of more than $20 in bills and change collected by the ladies who cooked meals and sold the traditional kolache pastries from the Opera House kitchen. The search continues with hopes for unearthing photo albums from the Opera House museum.

“It’s our Czech heritage that we’re so anxious to preserve,” Zahradnik said.

Phase II of the plan calls for stabilizing the native limestone walls of the burned-out building. They’ve set construction of a new Opera House as the third phase.

The ground floor of the century-old polka dance hall served for decades as the gathering place for Czech dinners, wedding dances and funerals, Sokol body-building workouts and lodge meetings. The basement museum housed a collection of Czech artifacts and photo scrapbooks donated by local residents.

Sebesta, who served as museum curator, moved through the debris with volunteer Jane Galliert. Together they unearthed three vegetable bowls printed with a rose pattern and a smaller clear glass bowl – those were all in the green cupboard, Sebesta said. Galliert held up a larger-than-life plastic owl, now flattened and ash-covered, that once graced the rooftop of the Opera House building.

Across the street from the Opera House, the recently restored Midland Hotel stands as an encouragement to the group. The two buildings share similar architectural features such as the arched windows on the front.

The Midland had a fire in 1901, the same year the Opera House opened, and was successfully rebuilt, said Roger Hubert, a volunteer and a member of the Wilson Opera House Corporation.

He’s heard stories that every Opera House has a ghost, and he’d like to think it was the Opera House ghost that led him to discover the bank bag that provided seed money for the rebuilding effort.

“The Opera House stood as the heart of this community,” Hubert said. “The builders, those who married and the funerals of the people who were part of the founding of the Czech culture of Wilson, those are the souls who are encouraging us forward.”

After they have recovered everything that has sentimental value to the Czech history, they’ll market the tangled piles of scrap iron and other metal in the residue for the rebuilding fund.

“That’s our plan,” Zahradnik said.

They’re hopeful that the many Czech groups from across the United States will contribute to the effort. He’s already heard from people in Prague, Czech Republic, who are eager to help, he said.