Exhibit shares tales from county's women

By the time a girl is old enough to read, she learns two Idaho histories - the one written by men and the one lived by women

~Betty Penson-Ward

By CAROLINE LOBSINGER

Staff writer

SANDPOINT — Before moving to Sandpoint, Ella Mae Farmin and her family had fallen upon hard times.

To help the family, Ella M. as she was known to loved ones, had begun selling corsets on an established route. One day, she was talking when she realized she was in a “resort” and the potential customer was a madam.

“She had to go along and convince the madam that yes she wanted to be a part of it but she was just going to go home and get a couple of items so she could get through the unbolted door and leave and not become a soiled dove,” Heather Upton, Bonner County History Museum curator, said. “She said I couldn’t get out of there fast enough and I was so scared for my life. It was so hilarious how she described it.”

The story was just one that Upton came across while researching the museum’s newest exhibit, “The Women Who Shaped Bonner County,” which opens Saturday during a special grand opening from 4-6 p.m.

The exhibit pays tribute to the lives of some of the extraordinary women who came to the rough-and-tumble Inland Northwest and planted farms, built businesses, raised families, and often quietly defied convention to improve life in North Idaho, museum officials said in a press release. Not only did these women influence the immediate region, but some also participated in important changes taking place throughout the nation. Without each one of their contributions, Bonner County would be a different place today.

“I really wanted to showcase these women,” she said. “The thing that is so hard is there were so many incredible women that were doing wonderful things but they weren’t necessarily documented. And that has been, I think, my greatest struggle is missing someone but we’re very clear about that. This is just a few of the many incredible women that really helped to shape this area. The women who stood out to me were the individuals that had to do what they had to do but still really remained pure to themselves and their values.”

Upton came up with the idea for the exhibit after a dress historian came into the museum to do research for a book the woman is writing on corsets and whale boning structures.

“We started talking about the women and the corsets and the dresses that they wore and how amazing it was that they were able to be dressed like that and be walking down the rural streets and be living a rural life,” Upton said.

The conversation — along with questions posed during the museum’s recent “Tales of the Wardrobe” exhibit which featured fashion from 1880s to the 1960s, made Upton curious: Just how DID the county’s early residents wear such clothes living such a rural life and who were they, those early women who had such an impact?

“So with this new exhibit I’m looking forward to answering those questions that people were asking,” she added.

What followed was a year of research by Upton and a team of museum volunteers and dedicated staff of working to discover who the women were and what impact they had on Bonner County. Still more volunteers helped transform the story from information to reality, from donating stumps for a stump farm to painting the museum in preparation for the exhibit.

Upton split the exhibit into categories to help tell the women’s stories, including arts and culture area, education, politics, civic, and pioneering (complete with a real stump farm) as well as business, ranging from professional women to entrepreneurs. With more than a million items, including archival material, sometimes it’s a matter of going through the shelves and letting the items tell their stories, Upton said.

“When the museum is closed I get to go in the back and I physically go through every shelf and look for items,” Upton said. “A lot of times what’s so neat is I find an item that hasn’t been on exhibit for a while and I get to pull it out — like this old stove which I found, which is gorgeous, and I put it in my one-room schoolhouse exhibit — so I’m looking for things I can really highlight to that haven’t been out.”

After a lot of research, Upton began creating the narrative stories for the women and worked to match them with objects in the museum’s collection.

“Sometimes I don’t unfortunately have amazing objects, let’s say on Ella Mae Farmin, but I have the Farmin plot maps,” she said. “Or I can create this wonderful scene on education and I can bring out the Seneacquoteen school’s inkwell and the Dover clock and build this scene that those teachers would have been in.”

Upton said she came across many amazing women during her research, from Farmin to milliner Minnie LaFond to a woman whose story told of how she lived in her barn in order to run her home as a boarding house to support her family during the Great Depression.

The three were just a few of the women Upton said she came to know and for whom she gained tremendous respect. It was a rough time for the women during the early days of Bonner County — some were widows, some were abandoned, some had little or nothing but they all had a vision of making the community a thriving, amazing home, she said.

“They were very strong,” Upton said. “They weren’t doing it so their name was in the paper. They were doing it because they really believed in it and wanted a better place and they believed in this area and they wanted it to be an amazing place to raise their children. That’s why they had to start the Sunday school in a saloon until they were able to build a legitimate church.

“They just had these great visions. It just makes me very thankful to them.”

Another woman who Upton met through her research was Rugna Sund Reynolds, who spent most of her education going through the Sandpoint school system and became one of the country’s first yeomanettes serving in World War I.

“There was this clause in the Navy and these women discovered through this one branch because it was written a certain way, that they were actually allowed to serve,” Upton said. “And some were out on the front lines.”

“Because of the wonderful donations that we have and the information we have about Rugna, I get to tell the story about yeomanettes, which I think is really neat,” Upton said. “One of the things I work really hard to do is share new information. I don’t want to show everyone the same photos that they’ve seen everywhere or share the same stories. I want to introduce something new, bring out new artifacts, new photos, new stories.

Perhaps one of her favorite stories found during her research is that of Ella Mae Farmin and town milliner Minnie LaFond. Tired of the town’s muddy streets and the inaction of the town fathers to bring sand to alleviate the problem, the pair took the matter into their own hands, said Upton.

“Finally they lifted up their skirts and they plopped right down in the middle of the street and the town fathers were so humiliated,” she added, laughing. “They waded in the mud until they came and put the sand in and they finally did. And it just shows how amazing these women are and it just gives me goosebumps.”

Along with the exhibit opening, museum officials said there will be a chance for community residents to get their holiday shopping done early as the gift shop will be decked out in all its winter wonderland glory. Admission to the event is free with a purchase in the gift shop, and donations are welcome.

The exhibit was sponsored by The Paint Bucket and Community Assistance League.

Information: bonnercountyhistory.org

Caroline Lobsinger can be reached by email at clobsinger@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @CarolDailyBee.