The oldest building in Pocatello

People have an odd relationship with superlatives. Something is somehow more valuable or significant if we can attach a superlative to it like newest, oldest, fastest, slowest, richest, poorest, biggest, smallest, ugliest, or prettiest. It’s as if the world is a carnival and the only sideshows worth seeing are the ugliest baby and the biggest woman (who may or may not have the longest mustache).

This hunt for things that are something-est seems to matter more the closer we get to home. We might like to know what is the longest continually inhabited site in the world (opinions differ, it might be Tarsus), but we may find out it is a long way away in Turkey and not so important as we supposed. So we ask which building still in use in the Continental United States is the oldest (Palace of the Governors built in 1610 in Santa Fe), but if you don’t live close to New Mexico that just doesn’t seem really significant either. Here in Idaho we all learn that the Cataldo Mission is the oldest building in the state, but that’s a long ways away from Pocatello too.

So local history nerds (myself included) cut to the chase and demand to know, “What’s the oldest building still standing in Pocatello?” Why this should matter is a question for sociologists, anthropologists, and probably a psychologist, but it’s a question we seem compelled to ask and we want an answer. Not only do we want an answer, we want conclusive proof! It is at this point that things begin to go sideways.

First, our history in Pocatello is a bit of a mess because amateur historians like myself often get sloppy. For example, recently I made a boneheaded mistake by crediting two old photos of electric lights in Pocatello to Benedicte Wrensted, who had not yet made it to Pocatello when they were taken. They should have been credited to her predecessor J.J. McEvoy who (probably) took the photographs. This kind of thing happens all too often. Without editors lashing our work or academic advisors questioning our sources for every statement, we relish in the freedom and make some pretty silly mistakes. Worse, unlike my ability to correct a story online (which I did), once things get into print they have a habit of staying wrong or slipping into other people’s work unchallenged. However, amateur historians are often the only ones who are willing to take up the task and their work can be valuable. We mean well, but meaning well and doing well are not the same thing. We just need to have someone check our work.

Of course there are also some “histories” where the intention is to embellish things a bit. Some were written by politicians, family members, or business owners who varnish the truth a bit for their own interests. So, as we dig through these sources, we often find little (or massive) errors scattered about and nearly every point has to be questioned.

Third, even in the professional arena, “facts” change as more eyes are cast on a time period, more materials appear, and more in-depth work is done. What may have been a good educated guess fifty years ago (or yesterday) is now conclusively proven wrong. This is the nature of writing history and we who engage in it, all too often, find that humility is a wise attribute to have since whatever we write today could be completely trashed by a 94-year-old grandmother’s scrapbook that suddenly comes out of a cupboard tomorrow.

Finally, and a major complicating fact in the first three, Pocatello did not come about like many other cities in the country. In fact, it did not come about like ANY other city in the country. At the outset the land was “acquired” from an Indian reservation by a railroad company under shady circumstances, then it was just a railroad right of way and not an incorporated city even though it had non-railroad residents, then it was expanded again under even more shady circumstances, and then (by an act of the U.S. Congress on September 1, 1888) it became a town, and then it was expanded by another act of Congress, but a bunch of sooners in 1903 tried to beat everyone else at the game even though everybody was in on the scam.

Attempting to unravel all of this to find out even simple things, such as which building in town is the oldest, can be ridiculously difficult for a city that is only a bit over 130-years-old. So, with the problem clearly clouded, let’s see what we can figure out.

Initially there was no Pocatello and nobody really cared much about going through the valley where it now stands nor into what was then just a lava-filled and mosquito infested narrower valley where Inkom is today. It was much easier to travel through other valleys. The idea of dropping any kind of settlement into the Portneuf valley was far from anyone’s mind. The only lasting structure in the area was the Fort Hall trading post down in the river bottoms near where the Portneuf and Snake rivers met. Completed by Nathaniel Wyeth in July 31, 1834, it was little more than a place to grab some food, trade some furs, and then depart after a night’s rest. The fort later became a stopping off point for emigrants on the Oregon Trail.

So far, so good. Nice and simple, right? Hold on to your hats!

In 1863 the abandoned Fort Hall was flooded and destroyed. A new Fort Hall was built in 1864 on nearby Spring Creek, and eventually destroyed. When 1866 came along the military established Camp Lander a bit north of the original Fort Hall, and it was eventually destroyed. In 1868 the Fort Hall Reservation was established. The town of Fort Hall was actually established in 1867 and, of course, still exists (and might have some of the oldest buildings in the area but nobody knows for sure).  In 1870 a newer Fort Hall was built by the military on Lincoln Creek, and eventually destroyed. Today, there is also the Fort Hall replica in Pocatello, but that’s a replica and, despite signs everywhere and a helpful staff telling them otherwise, some people still think it is the original fort.

Of course, other than the replica, none of these buildings were in what is now Pocatello. However, it does illustrate what the attitude toward buildings was in the mid-19th century in the Portneuf area. They were utilitarian and nobody was too worried about historical significance. It also shows how confusing things can be. When speaking about “Fort Hall” we have to figure out which of the six Fort Halls we are talking about and also make sure it’s not Camp Lander being erroneously called Fort Hall. It’s little wonder “facts” can be difficult to untangle in the early days of the region.

Things changed for the area after July 28, 1862 when gold was discovered at Grasshopper Creek in what is now Montana. Traffic through the region was not just westward bound anymore on the Oregon Trail, now it flowed northward too from Salt Lake to the mines. Originally the freighter traffic from Utah to Montana travelled through the Malad Valley, down Bannock Creek, and on to one of the Fort Halls before continuing north.

Eventually the government got involved and around 1865 gave a franchise to William Murphy to operate a toll road through Marsh Valley, into the Portneuf Narrows (what we oafishly today call “the gap”), and out into the Portneuf Valley where the City of Pocatello is today. The idea was to shorten the trip to Montana and it worked well. It was not long before the railroad companies cast their eyes on the route (and profit) of the freighters and in 1881 the Oregon Short Line commenced construction. By 1882 the railroad had arrived at a place that was being called Pocatello Junction where the east-west railroad met the north-south railroad. That the railroad got there by first illegally building on the reservation was just a minor inconvenience to the railroad executives who could rely on their friends in Congress to rubber stamp it all later.

Pocatello Junction was not much to look at. The first “house” in the area was nothing more than a boxcar appropriated by Joseph Edson and his wife for a domicile and telegraph office over by Pocatello Creek (the original OSL line ran up the east side of the valley through what is now ISU). Everybody else working around the junction lived in boxcars and tents. Clearly we can’t call any of these structures “buildings” except in the most rudimentary sense and thankfully they don’t still survive.

The first substantial structure built was the Pacific Hotel, erected in 1883, that served as depot, hotel, and administrative offices for the railroad. A few other railroad buildings were also put up. The joining of the railroads made the site attractive to commerce and soon buildings were appearing on the railroad’s right of way in earnest.

Still, Pocatello Junction was just that, a railroad junction in the heart of an Indian reservation. There were no city offices, no county recorder, and no county assessor’s office. The land was all on the railroad right of way and as long as you stayed out of their way you could build along the tracks. Of course what you built was not going to be very substantial because the railroad might change its mind. It was the proverbial “wide open” town and the only regulating agency was the railroad itself. If they have records of the buildings and where they were nobody has published them.

The town was so wide open that Pocatello Junction spilled illegally onto reservation land despite the best efforts of the reservation agent. By 1886 the town was bursting at the seams and the 40 acres that had been allotted to the railroad was seen as no longer sufficient. A petition was sent to Washington D.C. demanding the government do something about it. The answer was the ceding of more Indian land to the railroad, but that did not help for long because the railroad soon brought the railroad shops from Eagle Rock (Idaho Falls) to Pocatello along with about 1,000 workers and their families. The population again spilled onto the reservation. The Indian agent could not knock them down fast enough and more than once things got tense.

Congress supposedly resolved the problem by passing the Pocatello Townsite Bill of September 1, 1888 which allowed the Indians to sell some of their land within the reservation to whites for the growing town. Except people squatted on the choice lots to “improve” them before payment was made by the government and the lots could be sold at auction. The Townsite Bill said that if a lot was “improved” then the person on the land already would have first right to buy. It was therefore a land rush before the land rush.

Once all the rushing, lawsuits, and other wrangling had been concluded, the 1,840-acre townsite was a legal town. In 1889 the city finally organized and they got around to creating their records as best they could. Of course, being Pocatello, the people had ideas of their own.

The first problem the city ran into was that there were already buildings erected and many of them tended to front onto Center Street. Unfortunately, the oh-so-orderly map of the surveyor who came through during June through August of 1889 had decided it would all be much more orderly if the lots were defined as fronting onto the streets named after Presidents like Cleveland (now Main) and Arthur. So, at the outset the map did not match reality. This did not bother the surveyor in the least since many of the lots were also partially in or fully within the Portneuf River. His job was to draw orderly rectangles and that’s what he did. It also did not seem to bother the good citizens of Pocatello where those rectangles were since they had been doing what they wanted anyway.

Oscar Sonnenkalb had his own opinions on the matter saying about the clerks in the land office, "...who, without doubt were not interested in the advantages of a sensible city place for the coming generations, but divided up the donated land mechanically into streets and blocks along the Rail road tracks without providing for a practical width of business street, park reservations along the river banks, or in any other part of the extensive selected city terrain, without paying attention to the drainage of the ground, or the rocky surface of the ground west of the river, etc." Undoubtedly the clerks would reply, “Nobody cared about those things before we drew the map either!”

Rather than force people to pull down their buildings or move them to match the map (or implement Sonnenkalb’s ideas of what a city should be), the city started defining their own parcels as being those that consisted of so many feet of such and such a lot on such and such end and so many feet of such and such another lot, and so on. So, for instance, on the north side of the 300 block of West Center no fewer than five separate buildings have their fronts siting on the same platted lot for half of the block!

— Seavers building at 302 W Center

— Walton & Curl building at 306 W Center (which now wraps around the Seaver’s building and also fronts on Main Street)

— The People’s Store building at 312 W Center, (which is connected to the Sonnenkalb building at the rear, but no longer part of the same parcel)

— 1st Person Games at 320 West Center (which wraps around 320 W Center to have a back door on the alley)

— Deckadence Board Shop at 320 W Center

It’s that last one that most people say is the “oldest building in Pocatello”. How can we know this though? There are no municipal records we can look at to prove or disprove this claim because the city did not exist until 1889. So, in desperation, we begin a process of elimination. If we cannot prove that it is the oldest, can we disprove it?

To begin with, we find a few buildings we would call “early”. The first that come to mind are the following with dates from the National Register of Historic Places.

— Idaho Furniture Building completed in 1892

— Pioneer Block building completed in 1892

— Walton & Curl Building (W&C) completed in 1892

— The Seavers Building was completed in 1900

We then start looking for photographs that are from that time period and look to see if the building in question is there. There is a very early photo of West Center from around 1892 (it’s incorrectly listed in the 1993 “The History of Bannock County” as being from 1889). We know the photo is from around 1892 for two reasons. First, the W&C building is in the photo with a large Dentist sign painted on its side and that building was completed in 1892.

Second, you will also note that one of the signs on the right says “Bakery”. This was the bakery of a Mr. Carl Furrer. On February 17, 1891 the Helena Independent newspaper ran an item from Dillon Montana on page 3 saying, “Carl Furrer, who recently ran the city bakery in this town is now proprietor of a short order restaurant and bakery in Pocatello.” Then, on May 1, 1892 the Salt Lake Herald ran an item on page 13 under the head “Pocatello Bakery” saying, “In the most central portion of Pocatello is located the bakery owned by Mr. Carl Furrer, who has been running about a year and a half...” What could be more central to Pocatello than Center Street?

Here’s where things get interesting though. The Herald article continues saying, “He has a first class brick oven, which, however, is entirely inadequate to his fast growing business, hence the contract is let for a new one, which will be filled with all the latest modern appliances.” This is important because we can see in a later photo from around 1903 or 1904 the building in question with “Bakery” written vertically down its side. Mr. Furrer not only bought a new oven, he moved shop.

Now, go back and look at the 1892 photo. You will notice a gabled roof to the right of the white arrow. That is the old Congregational Church as shown on the 1892 Sanborn map. It is set back slightly from the street and to the west of it is a small structure. This structure is also on the Sanborn map and is marked as an office. You can also see Furrer’s bakery on the 1892 map next to the W&C building. We now have a fairly solid layout of what is there in 1892.

Now, take a closer look at that 1892 Sanborn map. In the upper right-hand corner of each building is a number. All of them are marked 1 except the W&C building which has a 2. That is the number of floors in the structure. This corresponds to the 1892 photo. Notice that the office which sits where our building is today has only one floor? Uh-oh, the building there today has two floors, but let’s not panic yet. Maybe we missed something.

In the 1900 Sanborn map we can still see the Congregational Church, but to the west of it is now Furrer’s Bakery. It seems Carl did move to a new location and his new oven is off the back of the building as part of his bake house. But look at the floor numbers again. It is still one floor.

This sounds like bad news for those who believe this building is the oldest in Pocatello because today it is two stories. However, let’s check our work and jump to the 1907 Sanborn map. The Congregational Church is gone and (presumably) Furrer is still happily baking away in that fancy oven. He seems to be doing well because he has extended his kitchen around the west side of the oven and added a steamer. So, let’s check the floor numbers again. Something has changed. The back half of the bakery is still one floor, but the front portion is now two floors!

There are two possibilities for this. The first is that Furrer closed shop, had the front of his building demolished, then rebuilt it two stories high. That seems a bit drastic and would hurt business. A more likely possibility is he added the second story so he could rent it out or for some other use. That seems much more plausible. Why close your shop when you can just throw another floor on top?

So, at best, we might say that the bottom floor of the front half of the building is the “oldest” building in Pocatello. This undoubtedly will upset some people. After all, it looks like one of the early wood buildings elsewhere in the photographs and this is the only one remaining in Old Town that looks like that because every other wood structure of that period has been torn down like old forts in the river bottoms.

It is a bit disappointing to know that the bottom half of the front half of 320 W Center “might” be the oldest “building” in Pocatello. What are we to say to people who inquire about the oldest building in town? Do we say, “Well, it might be the bottom half of the front half of the building at 320 West Center”?

Worse, do we even know that for sure? Is it possible there is an even older building in Pocatello? Remember that the earliest buildings in town were built on the railroad right of way. Some were built by the railroad and some were built by the people who lived in them. When the railroad expanded and the city grew outside the border of the right of way people were forced to move. Virtually all of the buildings were razed (including Pocatello’s first school). This was not a big deal because everyone pretty much understood that it was all temporary anyway.

But I said “virtually all of the buildings”, did some of the buildings get moved? That is a distinct possibility. If the building was sturdy enough then it could be moved off the right of way and into the townsite. And why not? It would be cheaper to move it than build a new home. So it’s plausible that this happened. Unfortunately we do not have solid evidence this is what actually happened. It was so busy as people jumped off the right of way and onto their own, or soon to be own, plots of land that if someone moved a building whole or in pieces it would have hardly raised an eyebrow. There was construction going on everywhere!

One house that may qualify as being moved is at 535 W Hayden. It is a humble home sitting on a basalt foundation. The folks who wrote the National Registry application for the residential neighborhood seem to think it is consistent with what the railroad may have built in the 1880s before the building was moved to its present location between 1907 and 1915. It may be, but it’s hard to know for sure.

The problem is, nobody seems to have any solid record of what was built on the railroad right of way in the earliest days. Similarly there are other old buildings and portions of buildings in the west side neighborhood that might be from the 1880s. Houses were scattered all over the place prior to the date when it was legal to build there.

At this point we have to admit that with the information available there is no way to know which building is the oldest in Pocatello. The unique birth and growth of the city not only caused buildings to be put up and knocked down in rapid succession, but the association with the railroad and the creation of the townsite makes everything into a complete and utter mess until the little city began keeping records. At that point buildings were already up and it was not really a concern how long they had been up. All the city cared about was if they went up after the city was officially created. If you feel a bit let down at this point you are not alone. Others who have gone on the same hunt have come up with similarly vague conclusions.

Is this all a waste then? No! Pocatello has a unique history that no other city can claim. Our history is far more interesting than other cities and the inability to answer such a pedestrian question about which building is the oldest is part of that. While pedants might bristle at that statement they are not the kind of people who built Pocatello.

Pocatello was a city that erupted into history in the midst of the industrial revolution with all the turmoil and confusion of a volcanic fissure. Buildings were thrown up and knocked down regularly. Things grew by leaps, bounds, and U.S. Congressional vote. Fortunes were made and new buildings rose from the ground where before one two or even three others had been. Government regulation had to bend to the past rather than the other way around. It was a wild place filled with historical twists and turns that constantly fascinate.

So yes, maybe we should tell people the oldest building in town might be the bottom half of the front half of 302 W Center and when they give us a strange look we can laugh at them and say, “Let me tell you how it all came about.” I guarantee it will be a  more interesting tale than the tour guide’s dry monologue about some old government building far off in Santa Fe.

And let’s also not forget that 302 W Center is an important part of our history. It represents the earliest days when the city was being born. The fact that a frame building survives at all on Center Street is amazing and should be enjoyed!