HOISINGTON ? They came from Germany, Czechoslovakia, Russia and Great Britain to homestead the prairie in the late 1800s.

Roger Hubert came from New Mexico in 2002, returning to his Kansas roots, to seek a simpler life and his own homestead. A 21st century homesteader.

“I wanted a homestead in the heart of America,” Hubert said. The find, in Ellsworth County, ended a two-year search for a farmstead with its original 160-acre homestead and stone house.

The small two-story stone house sits on a hilltop, its wood porch and parlor sloughed off. A long, two-story stone and wood barn and stone outbuildings stand at some distance from the house, having fared better against the wind and weather.

A real fixer-upper. It’s just what Hubert, of Hoisington, was looking for and, he said, it is still salvageable.

“One could proverbially say, my whole life,” Hubert said, when asked how long he had been searching for such a place. “Since grade school, I had wanted a stone farmhouse because one of my uncles had an old stone farmhouse near Alma. Some of my best summers growing up were spent there.”

Even in college, at Kansas University, he actively looked for old stone farmhouses and barns. A fine arts major, specializing in sculpture, with an archaeology and art history minor, Hubert’s life took a different turn after graduating, however, and he ended up in New Mexico.

There he continued to pursue his interest in history, living on and managing two ranches, the O Bar O and Los Luceros. He began actively searching in 2001 for a stone farmhouse on an original homestead, making trips from New Mexico.

“I hunted and hunted and went on a lot of goose chases. There were stone houses without barns and some barns without houses. Some were too far gone.”

And some were too expensive.

“I’d been told of a stone house in Wilson but the barn was too far gone,” Hubert said. “I drove out a different way and this farm found me.

“The minute I laid eyes on it, it was moving me. I realized it had all the original buildings, was surrounded by prairie and there was no traffic.”

The farmstead wasn’t for sale, but Hubert tracked down the owners. After finding the homestead in 2001, it took three years to finalize the sale. He purchased the farmstead in 2004, and has been traveling from his farmhouse just west of Hoisington to work on the buildings.

So far he’s had a new roof put on the house and run underground electricity to the dwelling. He’s spent countless hours finding information on Josef and Anna Kucera, who homesteaded the farm in 1888, and Frank and Mary Chrudimsky, who purchased the homestead in 1896. He found a grandson from the second homestead family, living in Lyons, who had hundreds of photos from the 1890s.

“That’s any preservationist’s dream,” Hubert said.

The photos have given him a blueprint to reconstruct the house as close to original as possible. He recently used one of the photos to rebuild the main chimney on the house. The draws behind the house and barn now contain cottonwoods, but old photos of the house show a land barren of trees.

Hubert admires those Czech settlers who toughed out life on the high plains of Kansas. He has gathered furnishings, clothing, everyday items from that era, placing them in storage until he can begin living in the house.

Pointing to some broken crocks, Hubert said he dug them up from around the farmstead, using his experience on archaeological digs he participated in while in college. He’s also found shards of china and small tin roof finials, which he has matched to patterns that still exist today. And, remarkably, he found five of the original limestone sectionline markers still in place.

“Social archaeology” is the term Hubert applies to this microscopic inspection of lives lived in the past. One of his discoveries includes a door lentil, a decorative stone above the door, in the chicken house. Pointing to the bottom stones, Hubert shows evidence this was the original stone dugout used before the house was built.

Hubert’s work has just begun, but he enthusiastically tells of his plans for the homestead that he hopes to turn into a living history project.