The former Lander Elementary School has been reincarnated as a shelter for combat veterans.

Freeman Mayberry said, “When you think of shelters, you think it’s a place to house people, but that’s not all we do. A big part of what we do is help them get and keep a place of their own. And an automobile to help them stay independent. That is one of our main goals.”

Operated under the auspices of the Liberty’s Way Church of Christ, they received their 501(c)(3) two years ago.

“Here we believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but we don’t preach to you, we show by example,” he said. “It’s more about what we’re doing than what we’re saying.”

He said that although there are committee meetings Wednesday nights, once a week there is a private meeting with the vets. “They run the place.”

Mayberry said he believed the psychiatric and pharmaceutical care given to vets with post traumatic stress syndrome is a big part of the problem.

“You put these guys and girls in a room for an hour, and they get more healing without drugs or psychiatrists,” he said.

His Australian Shepherd, Daphne is also part of the therapy. “She comes up to them and they have to pet her,” he said. “She knows.”

The former auditorium currently serves as a community room, a place to congregate with positive people. “They feel comfortable there,” he said.

“People who stay here come and go, some I won’t see for years.”

One of their Vietnam veterans stood on a street corner in North Warren recently, he said, soliciting donations so he could buy fuel for his generator to keep food from going bad.

“The same vet came down here with his wife and daughter to have Thanksgiving with us. It was the greatest blessing,” Mayberry said.

This isn’t his first effort to help veterans. Years ago, he lived in Salt Lake City, and he said the local police “were not gentle about getting the homeless vets out of the park and away from the temple.” Mayberry put up a six-foot fence around his back yard, and he said the vets knew it was a safe haven.

More recently, he bought a house on Route 6 for veterans to stay in. Veterans who need a calmer environment stay there, and they keep farm animals. That is where he met, and temporarily housed, a vet who walked across the state of Pennsylvania three times to raise awareness of veterans with PTSD.

“People on the street, they know who I am,” he said, but now, enough people know about the shelter that he can’t do things by himself anymore. With volunteers, he said the shelter is becoming self-sustaining, although he said his biggest supporter is Brian Horner of Sugar Grove, who holds the mortgage on the property.

Although not a veteran himself, he said he has helped hundreds to help rectify the things happening to Vietnam veterans.

He said some of his family members returned from Vietnam “draped in flags,” and he remembers clearly the smell of a rotten egg that hit him in the back of the head when his family went to retrieve the remains.

Mayberry has his own demons. He said he has been sober for 20 years.

“By working with these guys, it gives me purpose. I get more from them than they get from me,” he said.

The shelter does more than provide temporary housing and a forum for veterans. There is a carpentry shop, a metal fabrication shop, a machine shop and there are plans for a sawmill. Some of the veterans have skills they teach to others, to help give them a step up.