Pictures of history
Local man donates 1920s photos of Nuzum House to MAC
Don Beaty instantly recognized the house as one his mother worked at as a young cook in the early 1920s.
The Nuzum House, on the South Hill’s storied Sumner Avenue, was featured in a September Spokesman-Review article about a historic homes tour to benefit the Moore-Turner Heritage Gardens.
Beaty instantly retrieved a collection of photos his mother had saved from her days working there.
But what to do with the pictures?
“I wanted other people to be able to see them,” he said.
So Beaty donated the 10 photographs to the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture’s special collections.
The Nuzum home was designed by renowned Spokane architect Kirtland Cutter and built in 1914 for criminal defense attorney Richard Nuzum for $30,000.
Nuzum and his wife, Jessie Nuzum, lived there into the 1940s. They never had any children and were a private couple, so not much information about them is available at the museum.
The MAC had one photo album of the Nuzum family in its gardens, but not much more.
Special Collections Curator Rose Krause said the museum welcomes donations of pictures and artifacts, particularly when the people and places in the photographs can be identified.
“The more you can document the better it is,” Krause said.
And the items and photos don’t have to be as old as Beaty’s donation.
“Our collection is very strong up to World War II, but after that we don’t have as much,” Krause said.
The 1920s were a very different time in Spokane, and Beaty said he wishes he’d talked more to his mother about her years working for the Nuzums.
Beaty does remember a few stories about those times.
“Evidently Mrs. Nuzum was a very good cook. She taught my mother some things and how to make some special things they liked to eat,” Beaty said. “She had nothing but good memories of working for them.”
On days Beaty’s mother had off, Jessie Nuzum would cook codfish heads for the family.
The pictures show the family posing with their friends and dog, Mugs, in the house’s elaborate gardens.
Beaty’s favorite picture of the bunch is one of Jessie Nuzum dressed in a black gown standing in front of an electric car.
“If you look at the elegance of that dress and car and the string of pearls,” he said.
Beaty’s one frustration is that he hasn’t been able to track down a photo he remembers of his mother dressed in her cook’s uniform at the Nuzum home.
But once he finds it, that photo will join the others at the MAC.