When Yvonne and Gregg Poole moved to a property west of Cortland, they gave the old buildings on the land new life. They converted the chicken coop into a guest house. They transformed a grain elevator into a workshop. Once they moved on to the barn, requests started to come in to rent the space, and what started as a passion project became a small business.
They have hosted graduations, weddings, class reunions, celebrations of life, even Thanksgiving dinner. But there have been missed opportunities, too, Yvonne Poole says, because of crummy internet access.
The Cortland Opry House held one music workshop there but ran into tech issues and hasn’t been back since. Country market vendors can’t use card readers, requiring cash transactions in our mostly cashless world. When the Pooles explored renting longer term to travel nurses working out of Beatrice, the proposal died for the same reason: weak internet.
