FLORENCE – The former Fremont Middle School campus didn’t sit vacant for long after it was purchased in May and then taken possession by Unbridled Holdings of Denver, in partnership with local investors, in July.
Now, there’s a steady buzz inside the three-story, 100-year-old historic main building.
Team members and crews are busy restoring floors and looking at floor plans while some businesses and organizations already are moving their offices to the new Emergent Campus, which originally was the Florence High School.
The goal of the property is to build on the economic development initiatives of Fremont Economic Development Corp. and a four-county innovation sector initiative, the Upper Arkansas Technology Sector Partnership.
In the future, Emergent Campus is envisioned as a “work, live, play” style business campus, with space for incubation, trainings, offices, events and living quarters.
In the near term, it will house the overflow of Fremont Economic Development Corp.’s TechSTART, which is located in the Apex building at 425 Main St. in Cañon City, and open with a pioneer group of local business tenants who share in the project goals.
Unbridled Holdings purchases Florence’s Fremont Middle School for $515,000
The main floor of the former school building will house a shared co-working room, conference rooms and office spaces. Entrepreneur and Cañon City native Chris Koehn, founder of Second-61, will move his Tier I and Tier II Enterprise Service Desk into the former library once renovation work is complete.
The basement and annex building will house smaller offices, and the top floor of the main building will provide space for conference rooms and nine short-term apartments and a club lounge for visiting dignitaries.
The partners see Emergent Campus as the next step after several years of successful rural economic development and as part of a larger trend happening in Colorado and across the country, according to a press release provided by the Emergent partners.
"This trend is strongly echoed by many industry leaders like Greater Colorado Venture Fund Director Marc Nager, who is quoted as saying, 'the next big thing is small towns,' and Beacon Founder Joe Toscano, who highlighted FEDC TechSTART’s success in his recent Forbes article, 'The Next Wave of Innovation Will Come From America’s Forgotten Communities,'” the release states.
“Rural America doesn’t need a handout,” Koehn said. “Rural America is the greatest untapped business and strategic asset waiting to be discovered by America’s business leaders. The men and women in rural areas are innovative, hardworking and creative and have learned to live through decades of job loss as industry after industry centralized or moved offshore. Technology developments and educational programs are helping to mobilize this strategic workforce to provide a rural talent pipeline that’s a fraction of the price of larger markets. Combine that with lower-cost infrastructure, lower turnover, and higher quality of life, and you have all the elements to help our national economy become more prosperous in the coming decades.”
Koehn also thanked the City of Florence for welcoming the Emergent team into the community.
"It's a blessing to be able to extend what's happened with TechSTART in Cañon City and encompass Florence in that longterm," he said. "We're a community - Florence and Cañon succeed together."
TechSTART's internship program also will be expanding to Florence High School.
Bullis said the Emergent team was honored to work with the City of Florence and Florence School Board, who share in the vision of maintaining downtown’s historic integrity while creating prosperity for Florence residents.
"Our hope is that the historic Florence High School building continues to be a positive force at the heart of the community as it has for so many generations before us,” he said.
