Lesson In Logging Off Training Counselors Dismantle Home That Will Be Rebuilt At Camp, Used To Educate Kids On How Settlers Lived

In seven hours Saturday, 58 camp counselors tore down the log home Marion Griffiths and her family lived in for 40 years.

The little house was built in 1935 at the corner of Coeur d’Alene and 18th. Griffiths and her family bought it in 1952 and lived there until 1991.

The house was sold once, then sold again to Kent Keyser, who donated it to Camp Lutherhaven on Lake Coeur d’Alene. Keyser bought the double lot on which the house sits and built a new home.

The log home will be reassembled at the camp, to become part of the Frontier Experience area. Hundreds of schoolchildren visit every year to learn how settlers lived.

Griffiths, 71, is thrilled about her old home’s new home. A few years ago, she moved in with her daughter, Faye Johnson, in a house on Mica Bay near Lutherhaven.

“I’m going to be right next door to my old house,” Griffiths said, as she watched the counselors work Saturday.

The old house provided new lessons for the camp counselors who, when they woke up Saturday morning, did not know that they would spend their day disassembling a house. As the final part of a team-building exercise, the counselors were bused to Coeur d’Alene and assigned their task.

They hunched over boards all day, pulling out nails so the wood could be re-used. They threw away dead mice they found in the rafters and chipped away at the chinking between the logs.

They pulled shingles from the roof, painstakingly removed windows and doors and carried out the bathtub, toilet and fixtures.

Finally, as a team, they carried logs, one by one, to a flatbed trailer and stacked them, ready to be reassembled at the camp.

“This is so rad,” said Josh Tays, 17, who graduates next week from East Valley High School. “We can take a piece of history to a place where it can be used by a lot of people.”

“I think it’s been a great team-building project,” said Kristin Ingalls, 19, a Whitworth College sophomore from Spokane. “We just got really comfortable with each other.”

Few of the counselors are local. Among the represented states are Texas, Alaska, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois. The young people were recruited from 38 different colleges through a national program for Lutheran camps. This summer’s 1,400 registered campers will begin arriving next week for one-week sessions. The counselors will work there for 10 weeks.

As they tore apart the home, Griffiths and her family watched and memories flowed. Griffiths was accompanied by her daughter, granddaughter Breeun Johnson, and great-grandson Logan Johnson.

Griffiths, her husband and first child were living near Mica Bay in a little cabin in 1952 when she became pregnant.

“We had no water, no well, no electricity,” she said. “The second time I was expecting, I said, `We’ve got to move to town.’ ”

They found the little log home and sold a car and a couple of guns to pay the $500 down payment. They paid $3,200 for it in payments of $30 per month. They sold it in 1991 for $40,000.

“That’s a profit, huh?” Griffiths said. “Just think of living there all those years. We got a lot of good out of it.”

Griffiths remembers the treehouse her children built in the giant pine. She remembers hauling stones from the Coeur d’Alene River for a stone fireplace in the back yard. All those years, she cooked her family’s meals on a big Monarch woodstove, heating the house with it as well.

The 23-by-20-foot house was barely big enough for the family of four. When the bathtub was put in, a hole had to be cut into the bedroom wall so it would fit. The home included a living room, kitchen, bathroom, the 7-by-11-foot bedroom where she and her husband slept and an upstairs loft that became her children’s room. A dirt-floored cellar served as storage for the vegetables Griffiths grew and canned.

Griffiths said her children hated living in the house because their friends at school teased them. The homes surrounding it were obviously more modern.

“The kids at school would ask, `Did Abraham Lincoln live in that house?”’ Griffiths said, laughing. “They were the only ones living in a log house.”

But Faye Johnson is pleased that her childhood home will be nearby.

“I feel happy that it’s going to be following us home,” she said.