Lost buildings: The craziest home in Trail

7 hours ago

8 min read

In 2024, I bought a postcard showing a group of people sitting in front of an elaborately decorated log home. I didn’t recognize the building, but the card was postmarked Trail (with no visible date). For $20, I figured it was worth taking a chance on, in hopes that I might eventually figure out who and what was depicted.

The message on the back was no help. It was addressed to a Miss E. O’Sullivan of Seattle and read:

Dear Ellen

Forgive me for not w[riting] before. H. is not here with us. But in Trail. I meet him some times. Come to see us soon. Why did you go so far away from home and H.

Love best wishes Mr Mrs G.

We’ll probably never know who H. was or why Ellen went so far from him.

I showed the postcard to local historian Jamie Forbes and we both puzzled over it.

But soon, I realized what it showed. For that, we can thank … Jamie Forbes, author of Historical Portraits of Trail. A photo on page 56 of the first edition of that book reveals the building to be the storied cottage of W.F. and Martha Thompson, who came from Washington state to start the Trail Creek News in 1895.

The home was on Block 27, Lots 1 and 2, on a hillside fronting on Spokane Street, near the corner of Pine Avenue. This was also on the west side of Trail Creek, then known as Gorge Creek, which bisected the two lots.

W.F. stood for William Fentress, but to critics and maybe friends alike, it meant Wrong Font, an ungenerous nickname for a printer. Martha (who also went by Lavinia or Vene) was equally capable as her husband at running a newspaper, if not more so. I’ll write more about her someday, but you can read all about the couple in Ron Verzuh’s book, Printer’s Devils.

What isn’t fully apparent from the postcard is just how unusual their house was: a two-storey cottage built out of eight-inch logs with a verandah, plus a cupola that was surrounded by a widow’s walk. The house was built soon after the Thompsons arrived and was originally square, measuring 30 by 30 feet. But it was forever being added onto, something remarked upon in a booklet called A Commercial History of Trail, published in March 1897:

The Thompson cottage is the result of a combination of ideas furnished by the owner, who had it built by the day. Alterations and additions are in course of construction constantly, and conservative estimation places the cost of construction (by the time the last carpenter has cried ’30’) at about $3 million, although the owner at the beginning did not expect it to cost over $500. There are people who build their houses by contract, and the publisher of the News has the utmost admiration for their ability and good sense.

(They were joking about the $3 million price tag. The carpenter’s cry is a reference to the old practice of journalists writing -30- to indicate the end of a story.)

We know a bit more about the interior, too. What was later described by a newspaper as a “rustic stairway” led to three small second-floor bedrooms, while a ladder provided access to the widow’s walk around the cupola, “where Thompson had a good view of early Trail and where he gained many an inspiration for a pioneer crusade in the community’s interest.”

The Trail Creek News of June 12, 1896 noted a “fine large fireplace” had been attached to the cottage and workmen were “also finishing up a bear corral and other queer attractions.”

The corral was for the pet bear cub of Martha Thompson’s teenage son, Loss Bernard. The cub, named Victoria Regina, was sold a couple of months later to someone who inexplicably sent it to friends in Missouri.

The Thompson cottage (marked “log”) with its various additions, as depicted on the 1897 and 1918/1923 fire insurance maps.

All in all, it was the craziest house in Trail, a title that wouldn’t be challenged until the 1920s, when Giovanni Vendramini began building his stone castle in East Trail (which is a whole other story).

So that is what is on the postcard. But as for who?

I don’t think the Thompsons are among those depicted. The only person who looks familiar to me is the man seated second from the right. He may be Eugene Topping, Trail’s founding mayor, except that in other photos of him (including one below, courtesy of the Trail Historical Society), his hair is parted in the opposite direction. If that is indeed him, then it stands to reason that behind him stands his wife, Mary Jane Hanna, of whom a couple of other photos exist, but both are at a distance, so it’s hard to be sure.

Trail historian Elsie Turnbull wrote that friends of the Thompsons “recalled many happy hours” in the unusual home until the couple moved to Alaska after a couple of years and “The log cottage in which they took so much pride passed to other hands.”

Who bought it? According to the Trail Creek News of Aug. 5, 1898, the women of the Presbyterian church put on an “ice cream and watermelon social … on the lawn at the home of Mrs. J.G. Callivan, formerly the Thompson cottage.”

Callivan should probably read Callahan. Civic directories of the era list a John Callahan as proprietor of both the Bay View and Meakin Hotels. But I don’t know how long the Callahans might have lived in the cottage.

Subsequent owners continued the expansions, including adding a large living room and a small den. I love these sorts of rambling, crazy-quilt buildings.

Meanwhile, the Thompsons divorced within a few years. Martha returned to the West Kootenay, where she remarried and lived in Rossland until her death in 1923. Of the cottage, Turnbull wrote: “It would remain standing for over 30 years although hemmed in by surrounding structures, its original owners long forgotten.”

A photo taken when the cornerstone was laid across the street for the new city hall on May 9, 1928, seen below, shows the Thompson cottage at far right in all its wacky glory. There’s even someone watching the ceremony from the widow’s walk.

(Courtesy of the Trail Historical Society)

By this time, part of the cottage veranda had been filled in. But still present was the H-A-H-A pattern under the eaves, which is the detail that made me realize it was the same building as the one depicted on the postcard.

Turnbull was right about the cottage eventually being hemmed in. Two neighboring homes and a garage were built to the southeast on Lots 3 and 4, as seen in the cornerstone laying photo and the fire insurance maps above. They were on the opposite side of Trail Creek from the Thompson cottage, but by 1925 the creek had been covered over.

At this point, another unusual home becomes part of the story.

This one was built in 1910 near the southeast corner of Cedar and Eldorado for the wonderfully named Noble Binns, a furniture salesman who was Trail’s second mayor and the namesake of Binns Street. (His portrait seen here is from the Trail Historical Society.)

It was quite a lovely two-storey home with a gabled roof. Rare for its time, it was a pre-fab, picked out of some catalogue, with parts shipped to Trail for assembly. Binns had his furniture warehouse behind the house.

The Trail Historical Society has three nice pictures of the home. So pastoral was its setting — between a smaller house and the Catholic Church — you would hardly guess this was downtown Trail, much less at a spot that would soon become the city’s prime commercial intersection.

(Courtesy of the Trail Historical Society)

Eventually the increasing busyness of the area and, one suspects, rising real estate values, caught up with the Binns home. In 1928, it was moved by horse-drawn wagons to make way for a new post office, which was built on the site the following year. (The latter building still stands, now home to various businesses.)

The house was relocated to the corner of Pine Avenue and Spokane Street, northeast of the Thompson cottage, straddling Lots 1 and 2. I don’t know when Binns acquired the property, but the cottage came with it, and it was still standing when Binns died in 1937.

My interest in the postcard was reignited when I found a story in the Trail Daily Times of April 26, 1939 about the cottage’s demise: “An historic landmark and one of Trail’s oldest buildings is being torn down … The Binns Estate has now ordered its removal ‘because it has grown too old for use.’”

The Binns home, meanwhile, remained at what was now numbered 1406 Pine Avenue for several more decades. From about 1939-41, it was home to Margaret Broadwood and her daughter Mary. Around 1948, the house was purchased by David and Hilda Irwin. David was a clerk at the smelter. By 1957, the house had been converted into a duplex.

Block 27, as seen on the 1935 and 1943 fire insurance maps, before and after the removal of the Thompson cottage. The Binns home was 1406 Pine and the neighbouring homes were 1418 and 1432.

The Binns/Irwin house is seen at far left at its Pine Avenue location in 1966, captured inadvertently when someone snapped a photo of Christmas decorations on city hall. We see the house has a new entrance. (Courtesy of the Trail Historical Society)

Hilda and David died in 1965 and 1966, respectively. In 1969, as part of the settlement of their estate, the Trail Insurance Agency Ltd. called for offers on the property. It doesn’t look like there were any acceptable bids, because in 1973, the executor of the Irwin estate, Mabel Bayley of North Vancouver, was advertising the house again for sale, calling it a “strategic corner” and a “revenue property.”

Consisting of two self-contained suites. Downstairs apt. has two large bedrooms, living room, d.r. [dining room] and sun room with fireplace (furnished). Upstairs apt. has two large bedrooms, l.r, d.r. [living room, dining room], and sun room with excellent view (unfurnished), garage.

Offers considered with $4,000 down, bal. at 8½ per cent interest. Monthly payments could be as low as $200. Will consider leasing entire building for $220 per month. Available June 1.

Either Bayley gave up or whoever bought the house had other ideas. For while there did not appear to be anything wrong with it, that August the building was demolished to make way for a parking lot.

The Binns/Irwin home bites the dust, as seen in the Trail Daily Times, Aug. 8, 1973. (Richard Lawrie photo, courtesy of the Trail Historical Society)

A new RCMP detachment was built on the site in 1975. Though its architect may have been very pleased with the result, a blander building is hard to imagine. (Until then, the police station had been directly across Spokane Street, on the second floor of city hall. You can see the sign for it in the picture above at far right.)

The other two homes in the 1400 block of Pine Avenue were also demolished, although I don’t know if they went at the same time as the Binns house. 1418 Pine was still standing and for sale in 1970. 1432 Pine still stood as of 1972.

The new detachment was then numbered 1418 Pine, like one of the lost homes. The police station also occupied the space taken up by the Thompson cottage and the Binns home. The site of the home at 1432 Pine became or remained a parking lot.

The RCMP stayed at this location until a new detachment opened in Glenmerry in 2002. The old building was then sold. Today it’s home to NC Restoration Ltd.