Poor farm filled void in county

SANDPOINT — Viewed today, the grounds of the former county poor farm are a forlorn sight.

The smokehouse looks like it’s frozen in mid-stride, rudely interrupted in the process of toppling over. A barn across the way is holding up in that rickety way that old barns do when they’re trying mightily to remain vertical.

The poor house itself — a rambling brick structure first built as a two-story home in the early 1900s — has seen all the insults that nature and time can visit upon a vacant building. It is bereft of windows and doors, drenched inside by leaks in the roof and slowly but surely dismantling itself as the original home calves away from an addition built somewhere around 1915.

But turn the lens of time only a small twist toward the past and you’ll get an entirely different picture. The place becomes busy and, for one young boy who happened to live just across the road, it is alive with the stories of the people who lived and worked there.

“I didn’t realize it as a kid, but it was a great place to grow up next to,” said Pat Gooby, whose family purchased the property when the poor farm shut down in 1960. “It was a lot of fun hanging out with those old guys.”

Early newspaper accounts chronicle the evolution of what began as the Hunt Brickyard near the Great Northern Railroad Station close to what is now known as Gooby Road. The four-acre tract included the Hunts’ brick home, various outbuildings and a pond — actually the rain-filled remnant of the hole where Hunt dug the clay for his brick production.

On Dec. 11, 1907, Bonner County commissioners struck a deal for the property and an adjoining 20-acre tract for what the Northern Idaho News reported was the “very low figure” of $4,200, “making a fine home for the county’s poor.”

Roughly five years later, the brickyard portion was sold to one Kay Bridges, who originally hailed from Louisiana and had some history in the brick making trade.

“This week he is cleaning things up around the plant,” the Pend d’Oreille Review announced on Aug. 9, 1912. “He will soon go east to dispose of some property and upon his return will set the plant in operation in time to supply brick for Sandpoint this fall.”

Those very bricks were used to build onto the Hunt home — a two-story addition with full basement, completed in early February 1916. The original intent was to have that space serve as the Bonner County Hospital, banking on the fact that proximity to the rail station and the surrounding wealth of open land would surely mean that the city’s development would naturally move to the north.

“I guess at one time they thought the city was coming out this way,” Gooby said, citing early plat maps that showed the area being marked for such expansion — earlier, actually, than the plans that resulted in the development of much of the current downtown area and its surrounding neighborhoods.

When the hospital didn’t pan out, the county put the building to use for housing the destitute and downtrodden. Virtually of the residents were elderly men and most of them had spent their working years on the railroads or in some aspect of the timber trade. In many cases, the combination of old age and injury spat them out of the workforce and into a life of poverty.

“These old guys didn’t have any possessions — an extra pair of pants or a shirt and that was about it,” said Gooby of the residents he came to know. “When I think about that place and the times, if you were a guy who didn’t have the use of both arms, you were done.”

But on the poor farm, these same men were put to work milking cows, gathering eggs, cutting firewood and working in the large garden. For their efforts, they got a place to live and hot meals from the kitchen.

“With the setup, the county had someplace to put these gents so they would have at least food and shelter and they might be of some help on the farm,” Gooby recalled. “This poor farm always had a big garden, cows, pigs and chickens. It had enough land to raise its needed hay with some left over for pasture.”

By the time the Gooby family moved to the land in 1943 — land they still call home — the poor farm had a few decades of operation under its belt. Pat was only 2 years old at the time, but it wasn’t long before his connection with the place and the 20 or so men who lived there got its start.

“I started spending time over there with the old guys when I was about 5 years old,” he said. “I did chores over there for about 10 years — milking cows and separating milk — and I got two meals a day for my work.”

A couple by the name of Graham had been acting as caretakers until 1946 — when both the young Pat Gooby and a couple named Charley and Alice Albertson crossed paths at the farm. Gooby remembers Charley as a man who hated milking cows and “knew the value of getting completely tipsy occasionally” and Alice as a woman of small stature who was a stern master and a great cook.

“She rivaled our mother with what she could produce from a wood cook stove,” he said. “Breakfast was at 7 a.m., lunch at 12 p.m. and supper at 5 p.m. If you were late, you were out of luck.”

Although the majority of the residents were aged 60-80, there was the occasional younger man who, today, would be described as being developmentally disabled. The vernacular of the times, of course, was far different, and Gooby recalls a resident named Charley Steel who became a pal.

“The story was that he got bonked on the noggin when he was about 6 years old and never grew any more brain cells,” he said. “Charley could not read or write and, even though he always carried a big pocket watch, he couldn’t tell time — except for 4 o’clock.”

Still, it was a skill that fared Charley well. Every day, except for Sundays, he would head out immediately after lunch, walking the rails into town to drop into a few watering holes and talk with friends there. On the way, he’d gather bottles to turn in for the few cents of pocket change he had to his name. Not a drinker, really, Charley would usually sip on a free Coke from a kindly bartender. All the while, he kept a close eye on that pocket watch.

“He would look at his watch and when it reached the number he knew — four — he would head home for supper,” Gooby said.

Sensing a good way to stretch the family budget, Gooby’s father managed to get his other two sons — Bob and Dick — on the poor farm payroll when one of the high school boys who worked there for $25-a-month, plus room and board, moved away. The brothers teamed up on the job, splitting the $25 and getting two meals a day in the bargain.

Among the colorful cast of characters living in the place were mail carriers, lumberjacks, cobblers and railroad engineers. They had jobs that ranged from being in charge of the garden to maintaining the livestock, but the real pecking order became apparent from who sat in what chair, who doled out the Bull Durham or chewing tobacco and who was responsible for making sure there was a full deck for card games.

Pat Gooby knew them all on a first-name basis — Ernie, Delbert, Wesby, Hodge, Franck and Charley.

“A couple of them had real broken English and they may never have even gone to school in the U.S.,” he said.

The Gooby boys, however, had to catch the 8:30 school bus every morning, which meant they had to be across the road to the poor farm in time to get chores done there, get to Alice’s breakfast table by 7 a.m. and back home to milk the family cows before school. In the evening, it was over to the farm at 5 p.m. for supper, wrap up chores there and then back across the road to finish up work at home.

“We were lucky that both barns had lights,” Gooby said. “Most of the time, everything was completed by 7:30-8 p.m.”

With the railroad tracks running right by the farm, the meal schedule was equally well known by the hobos who made regular stops there, according to Gooby.

“I’d say that 365 days a year there was a hobo over there looking for a free meal — and they knew exactly what time to show up for it, too,” he said. “The old gal would say, ‘Well, there’s the axe and there’s the wood pile. You fill up that wood box and I’ll give you a meal.’”

The men living on the poor farm “weren’t exactly proud to be there,” Gooby noted, but they were relieved to have food and shelter in a time before other forms of government assistance were available. That changed over time, as did the county’s view on keeping the operation alive.

“The political climate changed in the 1950s,” Gooby said. “They thought it was a drag on the taxpayers and they wanted to get rid of it. But what are you going to do with those guys?”

The answer came in April 1958, when the Sandpoint News Bulletin reported that the poor farm — now converted to a rest home — was headed for the auction block. Residents were moved to a new rest home facility on Division Street called The Manor. Gooby’s father ended up buying the acreage and the now-empty two-story structure across the road.

Standing outside the dilapidated brick building whose history goes all the way back to when Hunt was digging clay out of the ground a few hundred yards away, you can still imagine the men going about their chores, hustling in from the barn to be on time for the noon meal. You can almost see Charley Steel hitching up his bib overalls, checking his pocket watch and heading down the tracks for his daily rounds in town.

Different times, Gooby allows, but the results were good and the old guys were well cared for during those times.

“This poor farm was started way before Social Security and probably before the term ‘pension’ was invented,” he said. “It was a good program — and a real needed program for this area.”