This house was built in 1910 and has housed a number of interesting inhabitants. It was remodeled in 1990. The style of the house is Victorian, and it features a solid base color of mint with red trim. Perhaps its most unique feature is a roof that extends out above the driveway and acts as a covering for a car. The house has a visible chimney that stretches from the ground to the very roof of the house on the side. This house is in the East end of Boise right by the Roosevelt market and Roosevelt Elementary.
Gordon Smith, a mining engineer, and his family were the first people to live there. Gathering information from articles from the Idaho Archives, I have concluded that five different families lived there from the time period between 1910 and 1922, including the Smiths: the Corliss’, the Badgleys, the Longs, and the Fishers.
In 1910, when the house was built, Gordon Smith was part of a major car accident near Star at Hill’s curve, one of the most dangerous places on the line because of the thick trees so that drivers can not see more than a couple feet ahead in the daylight. At night, it is less dangerous because the headlights can be seen as they pass through the trees. Gordon Smith had been on one of the cars in the crash, along with sixteen other passengers who were injured as well. Smith suffered from his spine being sprained and bruised. Also in 1910, Smith also was a witness for a fraudulent land case. Mrs. Ruth Hunt had charged Joseph Guay with obtained money from her under false pretenses. Hunt claimed that Guay induced her to buy some land on the Snake River near Caldwell and she purchased it, later claiming that the land was not representative of what Guay had said. Gordon Smith was also part of the construction of Arrow Rock in 1912.
In 1912, the barn in the back of the lot burned down when Mrs. Corliss was living there. Her two sons had went out to get something from the barn around six o clock in the evening and realized that the barn had caught on fire from a patch of burning grass which had been set on fire from some of the children in the neighborhood. The barn was filled with ice cream packers used by the Cascade creamery during the summer so Mrs. Corliss called the fire department and after investigating, they concluded that the fire was completely out. At two in the morning, the neighbors woke them up when they realized that their barn was on fire again and was destroyed before the fire department could get there. Mrs. Corliss had believed that the first fire had started from the grass and that the second fire had been started from a different patch of grass that must have been smoldering underneath the ice cream packers where it was not noticed. The barn had been burned down completely.
In 1917, when the Fishers had lived there, there was a test conducted with 25 babies in Boise to determine the “perfection” of the babies, and the deficiencies of them on a percentage scale, with 100% being an absolutely perfect baby. Eugene Kerr Fisher, a 10-½ month old baby who lived at 1011 East State Street was part of the test. In the test, four physicians for the several tests examined the children and until the reports by the physicians were totaled, it was unknown how high the baby scored. A perfectly proportioned child may not have scored perfect if they were under the size or over the size designated for their age. There was 3 babies who scored 100% and 3 babies who scored 99 ½ per cent. Eugene Kerr Fisher scored a 95%.
In 1917, Miss Anna Esbensen went to Atlanta to tend to Gordon Smith, who was critically ill with mountain fever. She obliged to take the route that proved fatal to one mail carrier a year for twelve years with the exception of 1917. Her trip consisted of going from Boise to Mountain Home by rail, then from there to Dixie she traveled 23 miles by sleds, then walked 13 miles, and she skied 16 miles into Gordon Smith’s camp.
The house was seen in the newspaper 7 times in 1917 in the “for sale” ads in the Idaho Statesman.
It had gone through a period in the 80s when the yard was wild and overgrown and the house itself was painted black with a red door. It was remodeled in the 1990s, adopting a Queen Anne style to appear more calm and neat than the condition of the house before.