Landmarks: Owner works to preserve home and neighborhood history

There are several things about the Frederic Elmendorf House that make it a rather singular and special home – including a stairway to nowhere on its second floor and a small open bathroom on the landing at the bottom of the old servants’ staircase.

Listed on the Spokane Register of Historic Places in 1995, the house was built in 1903 in the Dutch Colonial Revival style, much more common on the East Coast than in Spokane at the time. And yet, the interior is largely in the Craftsman style, with a circular floor plan in which rooms flow into one another. There is also Craftsman-style woodwork, multiple built-ins and – unusual for the time – large windows in the home.

At 241 E. Ninth Ave. in Spokane, the house was built into a basalt outcropping on a bluff overlooking the city. Owner Joan Butler said the basement shows clearly where foundational cement was poured around the basalt. Today it sits next to five other vintage homes on the dead-end street just east of Sacred Heart Medical Center – near everything, yet secluded and private. In 1996 it received one of four Historic Preservation Awards from the Eastern Washington State Historical Society.

While the names of Spokane pioneers Cannon, Browne, Campbell, Glover, Corbin and others are well known – all having streets, parks or schools named for them – Frederic Elmendorf was also a significant presence in early Spokane. Only his historic home remains as a named site to commemorate his contributions to the community.

There are conflicting dates in the records as to when Elmendorf came to Spokane from his native New York, some listing 1889, just before the great fire, and some stating 1891. His first job was as a cashier for the street car department of the Washington Water Power Co. in 1891, according to “Spokane, Our Early Years” by Suzanne and Tony Bamonte. By the next year he and his brother J.D. established Elmendorf & Elmendorf, a partnership specializing in real estate, insurance, mortgage loans and rentals.

Over the years the firm expanded, and by the time Elmendorf died in 1941, it had a staff of 30, one of the larger companies in the city. As it evolved through the years, it eventually became the current Anthony, Baker and Burns, according to the nomination form for historic register designation.

Elmendorf was one of the original incorporators of the Spokane Chamber of Commerce, first president of the Spokane Board of Realtors (1911-1912) and one of the earliest supporters for the Columbia Basin Project and Grand Coulee Dam construction. He was one of the founders of the Spokane YMCA and took a leading role in construction of the Y’s first facility at First and Lincoln in downtown Spokane.

Elmendorf paid $970 for the three and a half lots on which his home would be built just over 10 years after first going into business, and he had it designed by architect W.W. Hyslop, who also designed two other homes on the block and many other notable homes of the era. Elmendorf lived there until his death in 1941, and wife Margaret remained until her death in 1946. After that, the home was occupied by a family of 16 and then a family of 12.

“And then I came along, a school teacher with two teenage children,” said Butler. It was 1980 and she had been living in a modern rancher in the Indian Trail neighborhood, but she enjoyed driving around Spokane’s south side looking at the older homes.

“This house just spoke to me,” she said, “even though it was a lot of house for my little family. But the location, the privacy, the veranda on two sides of the house … well, it all just felt right.”

And so she bought it.

“As a teacher, I had to budget and plan ahead to do the things that needed to get done, and I got to work,” said Butler, who retired from teaching third grade at Jefferson Elementary School in the late 1990s. The kitchen had been remodeled already, so she began with insulation. Later came a new roof, paint, a new furnace and interior design, much of the latter in the form of murals and tile work done by her adult son and daughter. An avid gardener, she tackled the yard, incorporating a number of flower and shrubbery areas into the basalt outcroppings. She had many antiques already and gathered more throughout the years, so the home is filled with a variety of pieces that reflect her taste and the style of the early 1900s.

There are four bedrooms on the second floor, some with their own balconies and all with exceptionally large original closets, and a charming attic suite. There are pocket doors, original brass fixtures, red fir wood floors, elegant dark walnut wood beams and an unusual stairway baluster with tulip-shaped cutouts. And in the southeast corner bedroom is a door, behind which a staircase leads no place.

“I’ve had experts look at it to see what it might have been there for, but no one knows,” Butler said.

When she was vacationing in Mexico 12 years ago, seven water pipes burst and the home was flooded. It took six months to restore. “Because it is on the historic register, insurance called for restoration, not just replacement,” she said, “so an insurance crisis manager was flown in from Oklahoma to help oversee the tongue-and-groove work, restoration of floors, lathe and plaster work – many techniques which are no longer employed in construction today.” She said some of the experts who did restoration work at the historic Davenport Hotel were engaged in the project.

So dedicated is she to the preservation of the home that she has helped ensure that it – along with neighboring vintage homes – remains in place. When she was approached by a developer in the mid-1990s who wanted to purchase the lot behind her as well as her home to build apartments, she told him, “There isn’t enough money in the world for me to sell.” And she bought the adjoining lot herself.

She joined with her neighbors, one of whom is an attorney, to make theirs a covenanted neighborhood so that the homes cannot be turned into rentals or apartments.

“These are old beautiful homes that tell so much about the history of our city,” she said. “They are gems that need to be kept and cherished.”