Milltown's 'House No. 9' recalls days of life in a timber town

I was driving out Boyer to Larch and I noticed a sign on the side of the street that read, “Milltown.” I am sure there were other words attached to the sign but it was the Milltown that got my full attention. Though the area was at one time part of a mill town there has been no mill there since Louisiana Pacific closed down. As I surveyed the area across from the Lincoln School, I fantasized a modern day Milltown that might be coming to that area in the future. I saw offices, malls, stores, fast food restaurants, and the usual array of condominiums.

I pulled over to the side of the road and spent a few moments thinking about what used to be in that area of Sandpoint — the real Milltown. It was in the spring of 1901, that the Humbird Lumber Company began constructing dwelling houses for their mill workers. The south boundary of this Milltown was Larch Street — just where I was parked.

I recalled going to Spokane to interviewed Pat Wolfe Parker a few years ago and have her tell about the time she lived in Humbird’s Milltown. Below, in her own words, Pat tells about the time she lived in house number nine and gives a graphic picture of what life was like in those days.

“I was born in Seattle in 1922. I came to Sandpoint in 1925 and we lived in a Humbird mill house (number nine) on Fifth Avenue. One thing I remember about Milltown was that the sheep used to go through and you really had to work to stay out of the way. There was one other house next to us because there was a big hill that went down to Sand Creek. The old highway ran near us and they would have to stop the traffic to let the sheep go through. I don’t know where they were going; to another field I guess. We used to sit on the front porch and my grandmother would take a knife and scrape an apple and feed it to all us kids while we watched the sheep go by. “

Pat’s husband added: “There was a whole herd of sheep, a hundred or two hundred of them, and they would clean up all the grass along the way. It was like having a hundred lawn mowers. I didn’t live in Milltown — that’s where all the tough kids lived. Let’s say we lost quite a few fights to them. I lived over on Lake Street; I was a town kid.”

 Pat: “When I lived there Milltown was all red and white. The houses were all painted solid red with white trim. All the windows were all the same — big and long. Our house stayed the same until my mother died and we moved down to number one.

“Here is how they looked: You came in the front door into the living room with its wood stove in the corner. Next was the dining room that faced Sand Creek. Naturally, there was a kitchen. There were two bedrooms upstairs and a big closet where mom had her trunks. We also had an attic. My mother used to make root beer for me and we had a pantry with a hole in it and that is where she put the root beer to keep it cool. There was an outhouse out back. The house was not insulated even though she had about 50 layers of wallpaper on it. She would take socks and put in the cracks to keep the cold wind out.

“Out back, we had big long gray sheds with no paint. There were four sheds out there and they were used for storage and there was a wood shed. We had a big back porch and we had an ice box on the porch - we were modern. My job was to keep the drip pan emptied so it would not run over. We finally got a washing machine and it was on the porch. We had a bench with tubs on it and from there the clothes went through the wringer.

“My mom was the bookkeeper at the City Meat Market so I was home alone quite a lot. We did have a boarder but he worked in the woods and wouldn’t come down for three months at a time.

“We had wooden sidewalks and there was a big ditch between the sidewalk and the old highway. There was a board over the ditch and we would walk that board to get to the house from the highway. 

“We did a lot when I was a kid. I ice skated on Sand Creek and I remember my mom used to skate to Dover. We used to skate a lot on Sand Creek and we would have a big bonfire.  Where the Milltown houses stopped there was nothing from there to the trestle. That was the best sliding hill and we used to slide down that.

“I left Sandpoint after I finished high school to go into nurses training in Lewiston, Idaho. Dr. Tyler was the one that told me to go there.”