Ida Powell House is
situated in Yakima, Washington. Yakima was a Northern Pacific Railroad immigrant
destination in the old West . Time has stopped at this old farmstead, just 3
blocks south of the modern YakimaConvention
Center. The Ida Powell House
and Estate consists of an 1895 original Queen Anne farmhouse, barn, icehouse
and bath/cook house. The 1.1 acres of
intact grounds are in the heart of downtownYakima's
oldest neighborhood South East Yakima.
On the National Register of
Historic Places since 1985 and The Yakima
Register of Historic Places 2007
NOT OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC
PLEASE stay on the sidewalk and
PLEASE do not trespass.
207 Union St.
NE Corner of Union And East Spruce Streets
A
Little HISTORY
The Ida Powell Estate remains today as a testament to earliest
rural Yakima's past.Ida and Finley Powell arrived in Yakima
about 1894. Ida was a very young mother with two young daughters.
Finley was in the cattle business, supplying Alaskan gold miners with beef
so he was often away from home. Ida Powell bought the land [at the edge of what
was then referred to as Fairview] and built the house in the Queen Anne style.
The original barn,
bathhouse and ice house are still standing. This was rural Yakima
in 1895. Union Street
was a private lane. Water came from the Old Union irrigation ditch. There
was an outhouse and a well until the typhoid epidemic of 1906. The
neighbors of the Powells were the Knuppenbergs, at the corner of Union and Fenton
Streets. A bit farther south was the home of
the Superintendent of the Washington State Fair.
In 1905, the Powell’s divorced in a somewhat scandalous case
that involved an attorney called Snively, a sheriff facing an armed Finley at
his front door and the Powell’s children hiding in the outhouse.Ida Powell remarried a banker by the name of
Cornutt. She moved to Toppenish leaving
the farm in the hands of her former brother-in-law William Powell.
By 1910, the city of North
Yakima had developed right up to the edge of the
Powell farm. Ida Powell House and Grounds sat at the rural interface
between town and country. Most farms in the close-in rural area were
subdivided into urban sized lots to house the influx of emigrants and
immigrants attracted to the area between 1900-1910 by Northern Pacific Railroad
advertising. The neighborhood
around Union Commons is a rare example of an intact residential working class
neighborhood filled with small scale intact-as-built vernacular houses.
This neighborhood, close in to the original downtown of Yakima,
is typical of urban development patterns in western towns that sprang up around
the new continental railroads.
This intact-as-built
historic area is a testament to the longevity, strength and charm of
traditional neighborhood structure. To this day the neighborhood still serves it’s
original purpose of housing newcomers to the City of Yakima.
There has been much pressure over the past thirty years to sell the site as
space for dense public or affordable housing, in a neighborhood with almost no
remaining open space. Yes, we have trouble with stupid graffiti tag art monsters that like paint garbage on historic buildings, but don't blame the house, blame them. It is remarkable that this property has survived.
Mission
S.E.N.I.C. holds the farmstead for the express purpose of
protecting the open space and character of our antique neighborhood, to
preserve the buildings, and to find an adaptive re-use of the property to
benefit neighborhood children once renovation is complete. S.E.N.I.C is
committed to establishing a facility to house Art, education and cultural
activities at Ida Powell, for East Yakima youth.
We have a lot of work to do before we get there. We need: money for basic renovation [like indoor plumbing],
skilled labor, period appropriate materials for the exterior and modernizing materials for the interior, respect for hard work, good friends
and neighbors.
