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Roseanne Barr’s country mansion remains abandoned in Iowa

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March 31st, 2018 by Ric Hanson

ELDON, Iowa (AP) — Renewed attention on actress Roseanne Barr following the return of her television show has led some to wonder what happened to an abandoned 28,000-square-foot house she was building in southeast Iowa with former husband Tom Arnold.

The half-finished mansion has sat crumbling since construction was halted amid the couple’s divorce proceedings in 1994, just a year after Arnold and Barr began building the luxury country estate near Eldon, the Des Moines Register reported . Barr and Arnold, an Iowa native, donated the 1,338-acre property to the Indian Hills Community College Foundation, which sold it to MJW Hawkeye LLC.

The mansion was too expensive to tear down, said Darrell Limkeman, the manager of the property through Mid States Farm Management Co. “Not much left of it but a big pile of concrete. The walls have crumbled down,” Limkeman said. “They built that 2-acre pond back there. Roseanne wanted it heated to swim in, so there is a lot of wiring going back there.”

Several other structures remain on the property, including six homes that are rented. One building that at one point was set to be the guard shack is now a home owned by a local resident, he said. Though the site is difficult to get to because it’s surrounded by pasture lands with no finished roads, more than 400 people attended a tour of the property five years ago. Limkeman said some of the visitors were disappointed to see ruins instead of a completed mansion.

An estimated 18.4 million people tuned in to see the debut of ABC’s reboot of “Roseanne” on Tuesday, more than two decades after the original series ended its hit run.