Saving history

Family, friends move ITD's Paddy Flat buildings slated for razing

Last May, Irene Ragan was at home, reading the McCall newspaper, when the picture of a very familiar house caught her eye. It was a home she’d seen each summer when she traveled back to McCall from Independence, Ore.

It had stood in the same place, near the edge of Idaho Highway 55 a few miles north of Donnelly at the Paddy Flat location, for more than 60 years. The newspaper reported the house and nearby shop were to be demolished; sad news, indeed.

“I recognized it immediately,” Irene recalled.

It stood out for good reason - it was the house she’d grown up in, the house her father, Lester Scheline, had built with his own hands in the summer of 1951. It was the shop he’d built, piece by piece, to provide for the family.

The old 10- by 12-foot home was growing too cramped, and with Irene due to arrive three months later, the new home was built to house Lester, his pregnant wife, Hazel, and Irene’s older sister, Geneva. Irene’s younger sister came along a year a half later. Once Barbara arrived, the five of them lived in the house for almost two decades.

Lester, one of nine brothers and sisters, was born and raised, and lived his entire life a stone’s throw from the property, not far at all from the old homestead Lester’s parents settled in 1902. Lester passed away in 2006 at the age of 89. He lived the final three years of his life with Irene.

“Lester was such a great man. If you knew him, he was the definition of a ‘can-do’ guy,” said Gary Jeffus, a neighbor to the family since 1992. In addition to building the house and accompanying shop, Lester hand-dug the well to a depth of 30 feet, explained Jeffus.

“There was nothing he could not fix,” echoed Irene.

“Lester knew most of the farmers in the community, so when he opened his doors as a machinist and mechanic, he had a steady stream of customers to keep him busy,” Irene explained.

She contacted Falvey Construction, the company scheduled to do the demolition, explained the situation and asked if she could go and take one last look around and salvage a few keepsakes. Falvey reasoned that since they were just going to tear the structures down, Irene certainly could take another look. She took the windows and doors and gave them to her daughter to make crafts with the old antiques.

“I’m very interested in heritage, antiques and history,” Irene said.

The Scheline name is still prominent in the area. Scheline cousins still occupy many of the nearby land parcels. The business Gary owns, Logjammer Storage, is on Scheline Road, near the right-of-way for the old railroad tracks.

“Irene had already made her emotional peace with it (demolition of the home), but we couldn’t stand to see it leveled,” explained Jeffus.

Gary and his wife, Dawn, first met Scheline in 1992, when Lester asked them to trailer his prized Jackson steam engine and take it to the Roseberry Museum a few miles east of town.

The steam engine had to be drained of all of its water to make it light enough to load on the trailer. A special truck was needed just to pull the contraption up onto the trailer. Even then, the metal wheels would chew through the wooden floorboards of the Jeffus trailer.

About the time they’d get it fixed, it would be broken again by the annual trip to the museum, where Lester would mesmerize visitors when operating the steam engine.

Each winter Lester would retreat to Garden Valley, but each spring he’d appear again and park his trailer about a mile away from the Jeffus home, with heating from a 100-watt light bulb he kept under his bed.

“I used to call him my tulip, because he’d pop up again each spring,” Dawn said.

Lester was instrumental in the first Jeffus building as well, as Gary and Dawn came up a few logs short when building their log home. Upon learning that they had fallen short by a couple of 30-foot logs, Lester asked Gary and Dawn to wait as he headed home in his custom boom truck – which had no seat (he sat on a block of wood) - and picked up a few logs he was storing near his home. That incident describes well the kind of neighbor Lester was.

“He was an amazing man,” explained Dawn. “He could build anything, and he was a walking history book. We learned something new every time we talked to him.”

So the second weekend in August, just days before the home and shop were to be demolished, Gary flew into action. Flew because he had no choice. There was a list of people who wanted to take possession of the shop (though not necessarily the smaller house), and Gary was second on that list. However, Falvey’s agreement with the individual in first position fell through, so Jeffus got approval on a Thursday to salvage the structures. However, if he didn’t get them moved over the weekend, the opportunity would be gone by Tuesday of the next week.

Jeffus had the day off on Friday, so he and some friends (one of whom was Rolf “Buzz” White, a member of the Scheline family who owns and lives on land next to the Scheline homestead) started that morning. He jacked up the four corners of the shop a few inches at a time, and used two skid-steer loaders on the house. Once the two structures were lifted off the ground, Jeffus transferred them onto a pair of flatbed trucks to haul them about a half-mile west to his place.
 
Even though the house and shop haven’t been in Scheline hands since 1972, it is still considered their home by most of those old enough to remember the family.
 
Lester caused a car accident in Boise in the early ‘70s and had to sell off the property to generate the money to satisfy the lawsuit. A few years later, the new owner sold it to ITD, which was building a maintenance shed at the Paddy Flat location.

The buildings served as ITD’s equipment and sign-storage sheds for decades. 

By 2013, the buildings had fallen into disrepair and began to pose a significant safety concern. The two structures were near the highway edge and needed to be removed to improve the line of sight for drivers passing nearby. Demolition was the easiest solution, but as Gary Jeffus decided and Irene Scheline Ragan found out, relocation and preservation was the better answer.

“Irene just seemed so sad to hear that the house would be destroyed, we just couldn’t let that happen,” said Dawn.
“It is very special to me,” Irene said with understatement.

Gary is not sure what he’ll do with it, but wasn’t willing to see it leveled. He said that if Irene wants the house, she can have it. 
 
“I know the kind of man he was, and the effort he put into those buildings, and I wasn’t willing to see that all torn down,” Jeffus said.

Published 10-11-13