History Corner

Exactly where Will Fifer had his jeweler shop after it was in the Plaza Hotel is not completely clear, but in the fall of 1908 the Council Leader said he moved his store “into the Hahn Building, formerly occupied by Mrs. Arrington.” That building was almost certainly on the north side of Moser Avenue, but whether it is the white “Fifer building” shown in many later photos is not entirely certain. However, a photo from 1909 shows the Fifer building standing about where the west end of the M&W Market stands today, so I think it’s likely that this is where Fifer moved in 1908.

In February of 1910 the Council State Bank opened “in the Fifer building.” Use of the building changed often, and it had at least two sections occupied by different renters. In 1913 Charles Warner moved his barber shop into it with a partner named Rice. They offered baths and advertised as an “agent for Weiser steam laundry.”

In 1912, after Adams County was separated from Washington County, Will Fifer and P.A. McCallum of the Adams County Abstract and Title Company spent several days getting eight or nine thousand pages of carbon copy records from Washington County transferred to Adams County.

That same summer, the Fifer Building was remodeled to be occupied by Morgan’s barber shop. Apparently Will’s Jeweler shop occupied the other part of the building. The next year (1913) Charles Warner moved back in.

In 1914 the Leader said William Fifer was managing the opera house (later the People’s Theater). Traveling entertainment troupes were featured often.

In 1915, attorneys J.A. Stinson and P.A. McCallum moved into the Fifer building where probate judge and sheriff had recently had their offices. (The courthouse had not yet been built, and the temporary courthouse on Main St. didn’t have enough room for all the officials.) Warner still ran his barber shop in the building.

If my assumption is correct, C.H. Wheeler ran a barber shop in the Fifer building in 1916. (See photos.)

At some point before 1920 Will Fifer moved his family to Parma, while still owning his Council building. A man named Jackson seems to have run a barber shop in the building in 1919 when Albert Adams and Emory John Keckler bought Jackson’s business. Keckler was still running a barber shop when the Fifer building burned down, along with the old Lowe & Jones store next to it, in late 1928. When it burned, the Fifer building seems to have housed John Fields’ shoe shop that Field had bought from A.R. Whitley that spring. Roy Snyder’s bakery also burned in that fire, but I’m not sure if it was in Fifer’s building.

William Fifer and family moved from Parma to Redmond, OR in 1936. His wife, Mabel, died in 1938. Will died in 1962 at age 88 “after a long illness.”

Back in 1917, Will’s sister, Alice May Hahn, her husband, Frank Hahn, and three of their children were killed when a train hit their car at a railroad crossing at Payette. Their 13-year-old daughter, Alice, who had been sitting on Frank’s lap, was the only survivor.

The photo last week that was supposed to show the Gould house, where Todd and Donna Gould Nelson lived until recently, was the wrong photo. I apologize for the mixup.