MIDWEST - Someone has stopped by, inquiring after the garage roof, which is now on the ground.

Donna Miller apologizes for her appearance and greets visitors holding the tool that began it all, a 15-inch "Slim Jim" crowbar.

She has called to say that folks interested in photographing the old Midwest Grocery are welcome to stop by anytime, but they need to hurry - what nature has not destroyed, she and husband, John Miller, very soon will.

"We are into community beautification," the retired Phoenix school teacher says. "That's all it is, we want the community to be lovely."

Having lived and taught in Green River for 20 years, the Millers at least knew that Midwest was in Wyoming.

A family relationship led them to Midwest in the late 1980s, and by 1995, they began summering in Midwest for four to six weeks each year to escape the Phoenix heat. Newly retired, Donna says those stays may get more lengthy.

"We loved this little town and want to make it look better," she said.

Donna's first project was an abandoned home on Watson Street.

Using her handy Slim Jim tool, "I took down the whole house and made a flower bed," she exclaimed.

Today, chain link fencing surrounds the manicured and irrigated lot and sure enough, a flower "bed" blooms in a patchwork quilt of colors inside an antique iron bedframe.

In the late 1980s, when she demolished the first house, the city "gave me a key to the town," she laughs.

The lot behind their home on the corner of Stock Street (the first street in town) was used for parking old trucks. She didn't want to see trucks out her kitchen window, so she bought the lot, cleared it, purchased 12 old fire hydrants from the Town of Edgerton, and soon will have a fire hydrant park for the community to enjoy on Wilson Street.

"The pipe on each [hydrant] will be cut to three feet, and there will be flowers and planters and benches," she said. "And I'm having a painting contest for people to paint the fire hydrants individually."

Next to the fire hydrant park on Wilson Street is the old Midwest Grocery, which she bought last year. But it hadn't been a grocery for some time.

At the Salt Creek Museum, Sandy Schutte shows a photograph of the building, then a drugstore, in 1929.

"It had a soda fountain with a pharmacy in the back," Schutte said.

According to Schutte, the commissary burned in 1948, and that left Midwest without a grocery. For several decades following that, the drugstore was the grocery.

Today, the "floor is collapsing down and the roof is caving in," Donna says. It is filled with junk, most not salvageable.

The man Donna Miller purchased the building from had plans to open a second-hand store but never did.

A peek inside the front door reveals an avocado green stove with a white figurine, perhaps the Virgin Mary, on top. A tipped over vase holds pink artificial flowers.

This lot, too, will be flower beds and rose gardens.

Donna says town officials are grateful someone is removing the eyesore that the grocery has become.

"We have their blessings multiple times over," she said. "They want it gone before somebody gets hurt."

The home they purchased to live in is on the same lot where a boarding house for oilfield workers used to stand. It burned in the 1940s.

Their yellow house originally had just bedrooms and a sitting room.

An addition was added later to the back of house, and the Millers thought it had enough promise that they are gutting the interior and remodeling it for their summer home.

And while his wife's favorite tool is the Slim Jim, John Miller has resorted to more modern tools.

"We started tearing the garage down Monday," Donna says. "We took the sheet metal off inside and found some scandalous things. Then the big winds came and it blew to a 45-degree angle. So John hooked up his truck, gave it a pull, and down it came."

And there are salvage piles, one of wood and one of metal. And when the grocery comes down, there will be piles there too, but only for a short time.

Donna and John say anyone is welcome to come get anything for free if they can use it to make their own places look better.

After all, that's the reason for the Slim Jim.

Reach community news editor Sally Ann at (307) 266-0520 or sallyann.shurmur@trib.com. Read Sal's blog at tribtown.trib.com/Sal/blog