To call Jay and Sarah Stogsdill’s quest to open Liberty Landing a labor of love is a bit of an understatement. It’s almost akin to setting out to throw darts, but wind up chucking axes instead.
“But it has been a labor of love,” Sarah chuckled. ‘And sweat. And tears.”
Three years of planning, dreaming and dedicating every spare moment they had will culminate Thursday with Liberty Landing’s opening at 1054 1400 St. (That’s just south of the Humboldt turnoff from Old 169, otherwise known as the Sinclair Curve.)
The Stogsdills plan to hit the ground running with their restaurant/ax throwing venue/gun store.
They’ll be open seven days a week, with a wide assortment of American-style cuisine, from hamburgers and chicken fried steak, to a full breakfast menu.
Sarah has already entrenched herself in the local restaurant scene, courtesy of her 10 years as part owner of Simply Delicious, a combination food truck/catering service.
“If anyone frequented our Thursday food trucks, we will have a lot of that kind of stuff,” Sarah said. “We have a lot of people who already are familiar with what we do. And we definitely want to bring back breakfasts.”
FOR YEARS, Liberty Landing had been little more than a pipe dream for the Stogsdills.
They’d always wanted to own their own brick-and-mortar eatery, and Jay — an Army veteran who served in Iraq — has been a licensed firearm dealer for the past five years.
But repeated attempts to find a suitable location ran into repeated roadblocks.
They’d reached out to the city, county, even Iola Industries in search of potential sites, to no avail.
“We talked to people that own a lot of acreage, but nobody would help us with anything,” Jay said. “So we were kind of stagnant for several years.”
But one sight kept finding its way back into their sights.
The Stogsdills live just down the road from an old brick warehouse used for half a century by Sinclair Oil, near the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Rail corridor south of Iola.
But Sinclair Oil had shut down a nearby oil line in 1998, and subsequently closed up the building along with it.
There it sat vacant for the next 2 ½ decades.
