Edwin Robertson Coulter came to Weiser from Mayfield, Kentucky, where he was raised, after passing the bar to practice law. Having contracted yellow fever while serving in the Spanish-American War, he was influenced by reading a brochure about the healthful climate of the Weiser River Valley and moved here in 1902. He met Lucina Alice Williams a year or two later, at the Hotel Meadows in Meadows, Idaho, where he had gone to stay while meeting a client in the area. Lucy had been invited to come west by her sister, Oriana. Oriana, the oldest of the five Williams girls, had returned to the family home in Peckville, Pennsylvania for a visit, to try to convince her parents and sisters to follow her to Idaho; Lucy was the only one who
took her suggestion to come ‘see the West”.
Oriana had married Frank Hubbard, who owned the Hotel Meadows, and that was where Ed and Lucy met. The following winter found her in Boise, living in a boarding house on Hayes Street and teaching school. By June 5 of 1906 they were married in Boise, and Lucy moved with her husband to Weiser. According to a clipping I found, they first lived in the Uhr building on West Main (I’ve never heard of that) and then living in a rental at 125 E. Galloway, where in 1908 they welcomed their first child, a son Gus Givens, named after Ed’s oldest brother. Ed then set about buying land and finding someone to build them a home of their own. The Coulter house at 729 West Third was finished in July of 1909, in time for the birth of their second child, and first daughter, Elizabeth. A story about the house, which has no fireplace (unusual at the time), was
that Ed was running out of money and since he had no intention of mortgaging his new house, told my grandmother Lucy that she could choose between a fireplace or a stained glass window. Reportedly Lucy said she had started enough fires to last her the rest of her life, and she wanted the window. Regardless of the lack of a fireplace, the house was cozy with radiators throughout the main floor (still providing the best of heat), and one in the master bedroom and bath upstairs. The sleeping porch (where both daughters Elizabeth and Emily were born), was heated by a wood stove. When the cook stove in the kitchen was replaced by an electric one, the chimney that served both it and the wood stove in the sleeping porch was taken out, and glass windows were added to the screened sleeping porch.
Designed by the architect H.W. Bond and built for the cost of $3,250, the Coulter house features two large pocket doors that shut off the front room, as well as a number of ‘built-ins’, glass-fronted cabinets in the dining room, front hall, master bedroom and library, and closets tucked into spaces under stairs and eaves. The original blueprints, still in the house, showed the large dining room on the north side of the house with a bay window and serve-through cabinet from the pantry. By the time I spent summers in the house, the dining

room was the smaller room on the south side, with cabinets for dishes and linens, and the dining room was the ‘den’, with a wall of built-in bookcases added to the design. Probably about that time, the pantry had been converted to a half-bath. My guess is the original den was not only too small for Ed’s use, but too much of a traffic pattern, as it was a straight shot through that room from the front door and down the hall to the kitchen. By the time I lived in the house with my mother and brother Eddie (Edwin Coulter) in high school, the den was the family living room and library, and the front room was for visiting with guests.
The upstairs and dining room and kitchen have always, in my memory, had the Craftsman style fir woodwork painted, but the front room, foyer, hall and library have retained the lovely unpainted woodwork. In the sixties, one of Elizabeth’s friends told her she “needed to paint all the woodwork white and get rid of all the dark wood because it was all wrong.” Fortunately for us all, she smiled politely and ignored that advice.
The Coulters had a large garden on the same block, a clay tennis court (the heavy roller for flattening it and the lime roller for marking the lines are here) and a horse pasture for their
horses at the end of West Third. They also had a cabin on Fourth of July Creek, which the kids would ride out to while Ed and Lucy followed in the car, and they spent a week or two every summer in a cottage on the boardwalk in Seaside, Oregon, going over on the train as a family.

As a child, spending summers at this house, my brother Eddie and I spent many hours playing in the concrete pool, repaired by Elizabeth and filled each summer. This pool, we were told, had been built in the hole caused by a heavy windstorm blowing over an old cherry tree. We also spent time lying in the old striped hammocks after our frequent trips to the
library, reading Oz books, or playing Bomba, the Jungle
Boy (and his little sister), in the large old pecan tree by the shop. Or playing on and around the old root cellar (gone for many years) that was built in the backyard across from the shop and filled with the canned fruits and vegetables my grandmother produced out at the old cannery near the old Institute.
This house was, and is, a magical place to spend time in, and I am happy it is so close to the original.