Library Restoration Long Overdue Couple Make Hobby Of Returning Historic Buildings To Their Former Beauty

The old library’s arched windows and false balconies caught Roger Jones’ eye years ago.

Jones and his wife, Sherill Bottjer, have made a hobby of restoring historic buildings to their former beauty.

That’s why, when Jones saw the “For Sale” sign in front of the former Sandpoint library this summer, he decided to buy it.

But Jones may have got more than he bargained for. Some say the old building is home to a friendly ghost.

“Someone was thinking about tearing it down and making a parking lot,” Jones said Friday, as he visited the building. “Can you imagine that?”

He was appalled, too, that someone had removed the marble tile from the foyer and torn down the old wainscoting from the walls.

The marble won’t be replaced, but the wainscoting has been. Workers with Pucci Construction also have uncovered the maple wood floor, removed a false ceiling and installed $20,000-worth of period light fixtures in the cavernous interior.

They took jack hammers to the concrete deck that was added to the building in later years, and are pouring concrete for new steps to the main entrance.

“It’s an honor to be able to do it,” said Skip Pucci, who remembers fetching the mail here as a kid when it was a post office.

Jones and Bottjer live in Newport Beach, Calif. But they’ve been visiting Sandpoint for a dozen years, ever since they purchased a summer cabin on Diamond Lake in Pend Oreille County, Wash.

They are currently restoring a 16th-century home in Gloucestershire, England, and an 80-year-home in Laguna Beach, Calif.

“Somebody’s got to do it,” said Jones, a partner in Jones & McGoy Sales Inc., a manufacturing representative company.

The old library dates to 1927, when the federal government built it to house a post office and other federal offices.

While restoring it, Pucci’s workers uncovered a marble cornerstone, engraved with the date, the name of the secretary of the treasury and the architect.

The brick Spanish colonial style building cost $73,300 to build. Its construction was delayed 14 years because the onset of World War 1 inflated prices beyond what the government had appropriated for the building, according to the March 12, 1928 edition of the Daily Panidan.

The U.S. Forest Service was upstairs, and running between second-floor hall on either end of the building was a narrow mezzanine for supervisors to watch postal workers.

The government was apparently very concerned about hygiene - every office in the basement has a sink.

In 1968, the City of Sandpoint leased the building from the federal government and moved the library there from City Hall. High school students walked the 16,000 books to the building by hand.

That’s also apparently when much of the renovation occurred that covered up or otherwise modified the original structure.

By 1999, the library had outgrown its space again, and after the passage of a bond levy, the East Bonner Library District built a new building at Cedar and Division streets.

Jones and Bottjer bought the historic structure for $435,000, and expect to put about $200,000 into restoring it.

With the purchase, Jones and Bottjer got an unexpected bonus - legends of a ghost haunting the basement.

Construction workers and the new owners haven’t see the ghost, but at least one former librarian has.

Nola Solt, a children’s librarian with an office in the basement, was speaking with Jim Clarke, who was standing in a basement doorway.

“Suddenly it just felt sort of cool,” Clarke recalled. “That is not a place that was easily chillable.”

Solt told Clarke she she saw someone smiling at her over Clarke’s shoulder, but there was no one there.

“It was the third time I’d seen the gentleman,” who was always in uniform, Solt said. “I don’t care if anyone believes me or not - he was real.”

Later, when Clarke was working in the basement, he’d chat with the ghost; “I’d say, `You’re hanging around here and you really need to get along with your life,’ and I’d chuckle.”

Does a spook haunt the basement?

Library director Wayne Gunter says he doesn’t know.

“The building certainly had its creaks and sounds that would spook people at times,” he said.

The rumored ghost doesn’t trouble Jones, however.

“It’s an incredible building,” he gushed, as he walked around the exterior Friday. This was the first time he’d seen the building in five weeks. Much has changed.

“We knew it would be beautiful, but it’s more beautiful than we imagined,” he said.

He intends to retain that beauty, and hopes he can find a tenant who will appreciate the building’s charms.

“If we can, we’ll lease it out to one tenant, but we’ll keep it basically open,” he said. “It’d be nice for it to be something the public can enjoy.”