Couple Carries On Legacy Of Stately Old Farm Home

A wiry man of 40 years swayed slowly back and forth in a weathered green rocking chair on his great-grandfather’s porch.

Cool shade from a pair of 100-year-old trees slipped between white pillars supporting the porch roof. Leaves from the large-leaf linden and the horse chestnut trees frolicked in a fall-like breeze.

“This goes back to the Civil War,” Matt Collin said, patting the arms of the chair. “It’s older than the house.”

That’s a claim that can be made about little else around the Spokane Valley house.

Collin’s great-grandfather, Rolla Jones, had the house built in 1890. Jones was the city engineer who was away on business in Coeur d’Alene - allegedly with the key to the city waterworks - the day Spokane burned in the Great Fire of 1889. He resigned following the fire.

The porch and an addition to the east side of the house were built when the house was remodeled in 1907, the last time any major construction was done to the house.

The main floor is the only finished level of the two-story home that has housed four generations of Jones’s descendants.

Collin, his wife, Corrin, and son Gregory, now 9, moved into the house on Upriver Drive in 1988. Collin owns BJ’s Produce, a small fruit, vegetable, flower and herb farm cultivated on nearly six acres around the house and also part of his great grandfather’s legacy.

Out of work as a city engineer, Jones started the Riverside Nursery on property surrounding the house.

“He grew everything,” Collin said of Jones.

Fruit trees, flowers, vegetables and other ornamental plants stretched from the Red Baron’s Hideout Day Camp almost to Upriver Dam. Rows of fir, lilac and other trees from the Riverside Nursery still grow around the property.

“There are jungles around that are impenetrable,” Collin said.

Today, the Collins cultivate the land. Matt and Corrin, who also plays the viola in the Spokane Symphony, run BJ’s. They employ no help to pull weeds, fill ready-picked orders or do any of the other odd jobs around the farm. And although the crops Collin harvests are similar to his great-grandfather’s, it is not intentional, he said.

“I don’t tell people what they want,” Collin said. “I grow what they want.”

Collin has not always been a farmer. He graduated from Eastern Washington University in 1977 with a degree in journalism. He worked for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Salt Lake City.

But advancement toward his journalistic goals meant moving to AP bureaus in New York, Washington, D.C., or other large cities and Collin never lost his fondness for the quiet comforts of the Valley.

So he returned to a house still heated by an oil-burning parlor heater and a wood and coal stove - a house that did not get electricity until after World War II and that did not have an indoor bathroom until 1960.

“It’s still level and square,” Collin said, running his finger through a dark beard. “The floors might sag a little, but the walls are pretty straight.”

Collin also returned to a farming legacy that extended from his great-grandfather to his father and now to him.

“The very first year I did it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep doing it,” Collin said. “But it grows on you. It’s a nice way to live.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: Saturday’s People is a column featuring remarkable Valley people. To suggest subjects for future columns, please write The Valley Voice, 13208 E. Sprague, Spokane, WA 99216, or call editor Mike Schmeltzer at 927-2170.