MAZOMANIE -- The hardwood floor in the Creative Edge Gallery is unable to hide the past.

This is where the barber shop once was, and years after its departure, the round marks from a pair of barber chairs remain.

Across the street in another historic but restored building, the dance floor of a tavern has been replaced with a bike shop. The neighboring hotel is now a modern general store that sells micro brews and wines, as well as T-shirts that promote the nearby nude beach.

In Mazomanie, history is celebrated. It has played a key role in the revitalization of this village's downtown.

The grocery stores are gone and so is the Red Door Supper Club. Instead, there are art galleries, shops, a bistro, cafes and offices.

The old train depot is home to the library, and the Lynch and Walker Flouring Mill, which got its start in the 1850s, has been, for the past 13 years, the Old Feed Mill restaurant.

Renovation of the mill helped start the transformation of downtown. A proposed railroad museum and train excursions could help bring more life back to this village.

"This happened over a long period of time so there was time to shift and adjust as we went along," said Dan Viste, who has been one of the leaders of historic preservation efforts in the community and who bought the mill in 1992. "Our vision has not been one to simply maximize the rent but to bring in the right businesses that are compatible. By doing that and doing the restorations really well, we attract a market that values this."

Most of the historic buildings in this northwestern Dane County village, founded in 1855, have been restored and have tenants.

The Gandy Dancer Bluegrass Festival in July and Wild West Days last month drew thousands of people to the community while a strip of land between the Old Feed Mill and the downtown has been restored into a promenade connecting the two historic destinations.

Budget Travel magazine this month called Mazomanie, population 1,485, one of the coolest small towns in the country.

"It's a beautiful downtown," said Janet Easley, a custom glass artist who shares space at Creative Edge Gallery with five other artists. "You can afford to live here, have a house and be part of a community."

Easley, 51, moved to Mazomanie from Madison about two years ago. She used to have a combined gallery and studio but said the co-op allows her to concentrate on her work in a separate studio and have her work displayed in a gallery that is open more often, something that was difficult to do when she was on her own.

"It's just too much work to be an artist, display your work and wear all of the other hats," Easley said. "Inevitably, I would have my hands in cement and someone would come in."

Other artists include Sue Schuetz, a retired clerk from the Dane County Sheriff's Office who specializes in copper, and John Parsen, a retired soils scientist from UW-Madison, who does photography.

"We feel connected to the town," Parsen said Sunday. "There are a lot of people who are trying new things and this gives us a chance to get established."

Settlers first began moving to the Mazomanie area in the 1840s, many of whom were members of the British Temperance Emigration Society, popular in the Yorkshire and Lancashire regions of England.

The village got its start because of the railroad and when the first train arrived in 1856, Mazomanie had more than 80 buildings. By the mid-1870s, Mazomanie had more than 1,100 people, making it the second-largest community in Dane County, according to the village's Web site.

One of the newest residents to the downtown, which is on the National Register of Historic Places, is a former telecommunications executive who now owns ProCycle Bicycle Shop.

Mark Schroeder spent 25 years in the La Crosse area but in spring 2007 changed careers to open his bike shop in Mazomanie. His customers can be tourists visiting from out of town, state or country, but he's hoping his bread and butter will be from area residents.

"It takes a long time for people to discover things," Schroeder said. "I think it is a bit of a gamble down here but we like to think that this is going to work down here. It's a lot of people following their dream."

Viste, a former geologist, and now an expert at historic preservation, has had his hand in about a dozen of the almost three dozen restoration projects in the downtown area. He estimates that since 1992, $10 million has been spent to improve the historic buildings.

And Viste isn't done.

He is in the process of creating a master plan for five buildings that surround the Mazomanie Historic Arts Center, a two-story building constructed in 1863 and once used as a wagon and carriage factory and a blacksmith shop.

Viste wants the buildings to become an incubator for more artists and would like to eventually transfer the proposed campus to a nonprofit organization.

"This sort of amenity adds value and depth, particularly to a community of our size," Viste said.

By next summer Viste also has plans to return train excursions to the village, something he did from 1997 to 2000 for his restaurant. He also is in discussions with the Mid-Continent Railway Museum in North Freedom to help create a museum in Mazomanie about the Milwaukee Road Railroad, which ran a line for 135 years between Prairie du Chien and Milwaukee and through Mazomanie.

"It would focus on this geography and how communities developed, prospered and failed and redeveloped," Viste said. "That's how you keep the community vital, by introducing new things."