History Corner

About 1:00 a.m. on January 21, 1902 a clerk who worked at the Cohen & Criss store, and who was bunking in the warehouse on the alley in back of the store, awoke to the find his room engulfed in flames. He escaped just in time. The townspeople rushed to the fire and began pulling anything they could save from the warehouse and the store. The flames spread rapidly to adjoining wooden buildings north, and across Illinois Avenue from the town square. Before the fire torched the building containing the telephone office and the post office, people rushed in and saved all the post office cash, books, stamps, and money order supplies.

There was almost nothing anyone could do to stop the fire. It isn’t clear what kind of fire-fighting equipment the town had at the time, but water was used in some way, as the Signal commented, “Large quantities of household goods were carried out, but many of these were badly damaged by water, and some of the piles left too near the blaze caught and burned.”

Before it was over, a total of six businesses were destroyed, including the brand new hotel. Area newspapers disclosed no cause for the fire, but in that era of lighting with the flames of lamps, candles, etc., such fires were extremely common. And it wouldn’t be long before Council experienced another disastrous fire.

Meanwhile, the population explosion in Council had created a crisis in the school just up the hill above the fire. The Signal’s Council corespondent said 110 students were crowded into two classrooms! An addition was advocated. The White School (corner of present-day Hwy 95 and Lappin Lane) had 30 students.

In the Seven Devils Mining District, the new camps at Iron Springs, Rankin Mill and Black Lake were bee hives of activity. The Ford Brothers began construction a tramway over Black Lake.

In April the Haas Brothers of Weiser opened a store on the NE corner of Illinois Avenue and Galena Street. It was managed by Carl Weed.

All summer the Rocky Mountain Bell Telephone Company had crews building a phone line from Council to Meadows. It was completed in August.

That summer Robert Lockwood and Ben Edlin moved the Seven Devils Standard newspaper to Meadows and renamed it the Meadows Eagle. The move was said to have been prompted by “the general suspension of work in the (mining) district.”

Late in 1901 a wagon road linking Meadows Valley with Goff (Riggins) and Grangeville had been completed. It was the last section of road needed to link southern and northern Idaho, and took so long because the rugged canyon of the Little Salmon was such a challenge to road building. 1902 was the first time that road was heavily used, and the Freeman Brothers has established a stage lined through that route from Meadows to Grangeville. According to the Signal, by taking the train from Weiser to Council (60 miles) and a stage north from Council, one could leave Weiser one morning and reach Grangeville by the evening of the second day – a total of 176 miles.