The David family built three grand homes in Moscow’s Fort Russell neighborhood and operated a department store that was a cornerstone of downtown Moscow for three-quarters of a century. But the family’s first residence was a modest rented house in which I now live.

When Frank and Ella David and their children came to Moscow from Wisconsin in 1890, they rented a home from Kate Taitt at the southeast corner of B and Van Buren. Frank David built a large house the following year at the corner of First and Polk, across from where St. Mary’s Catholic Church now stands. Homer David, the family’s oldest son, evidently took a liking to the corner where the family lived upon arriving in Idaho. When Homer wanted a home to reflect his standing as a pillar of the community, he simply moved the rental house from the corner of B and Van Buren, then at least 20 years old, to an adjacent lot and turned it 90 degrees to face B Street. On the empty lot, he started construction of a stately Prairie-style home for himself and his bride.

I discovered these bits of Moscow history while attempting to discover when my house was built. I didn’t get a conclusive answer to the question – the evidence points to sometime between 1886 and 1889 – but I did learn more about the people who helped shape Moscow in its early years. With the help of Tod Kiblen at Latah County Title Co., I learned that the block on which I now live was part of John Russell’s Second Addition to the original Moscow townsite. It was platted when Moscow was still part of Nez Perce County – before Congress created Latah County.

The block passed from Russell to Charles Moore in 1882, and Moore sold several pieces to Arvid Hinman 1886. Hinman turned around and sold the northwest corner to J.J. Tomlinson later that year. After Tomlinson sold the lot to Kate Taitt in 1889, she took out an $1,100 mortgage, according to title company records – suggesting that improvements had been made to the lot while Tomlinson owned it. Whether Taitt lived there herself or just rented isn’t clear. The house appears on the 1892 poster, “A Bird’s Eye View of Moscow,” small in comparison to other nearby homes. Taitt sold the house in 1904 to implement dealer Charles Butterfield and his wife, Frances, who lived in the neighborhood. The Butterfields owned the house until 1933. Meanwhile, another David brother, Howard, took a cue from Homer and moved a house at C and Polk to make way for the handsome Colonial Revival house he had built there in 1927. (That house is now owned by Charles Butterfield’s grandson, Sam, and his wife, Lois.)

C.E. “Archie” Lampman arrived in Moscow in 1928 to become head of the Department of Poultry Husbandry at the University of Idaho. Lampman, his wife, Eleanor, and their daughters, Marie and Marjorie, moved into the house at 517 East B in 1933. The Lampmans owned the house until 1970. Marie Lampman McGough, who lives in Spokane, had fond memories of growing up in the house. She said the den on the east side of the house was originally a side porch with an icebox. The iceman delivered a block of ice weekly. The porch contained a trap door leading to a cellar containing a fruit room, a coal room and a huge furnace, she said. “It was a scary place for a small child,” Marie said of the basement.

The Lampmans hired a University architecture professor to draw plans to remodel the house in 1938. That project enclosed the side porch, moved the staircase, added a fireplace and installed two dormers facing B Street to replace the gable that was removed. I found a copy of the blueprints when I moved into the house.

The house had five owners between 1970 and 1990. In the early 1970s, the Vincenti family added a family room to the southeast corner of the house, the only major structural change since 1938. Bill and Mayme Trumble, who bought the house in 1990, sold it to me in 1999 after Bill accepted a job at the University of New Hampshire.

Along the alley in front of the house stands a tall silver maple, the first in the block to lose its leaves in the fall. Marie McGough said that she has a tree in her Spokane yard grown from a seedling from the tree that shaded her family’s Moscow home. The Spokane tree, though, hangs onto its leaves longer than any other in her yard, she said. I’ve invited Marie and her husband, who also grew up in Moscow, to visit the next time they’re in the neighborhood. I’d like her to show me where her mother’s rosebushes were.

L-R, back row: Verna, Homer, Earl; front row: Frank A., Donald K., Ella, Howard, c. 1900

This history was first published in the 2001 edition of Cornerstone, the newsletter of the Moscow Historic Preservation Commission and is reprinted here with its permission.

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