Family trees used to build Hayden history
From left, Hayden Historic Preservation Commission member Barbara Bennett and Chair Rhonda Budvarson review a photo of Lovell Tucker before scanning and adding it to the Hayden historical families data. The commission has collected data for over a decade to create a book of the city's history.
JOSA SNOW/Press
Barbara Bennett borrowed a family photo of Lovell Tucker, son of the Tucker Box Factory founder, to scan and enter to the city of Hayden's record of historical families Thursday.
When the city of Hayden Lake refused to grant Cleo and Austin Anthony a liquor license, they founded the city of Hayden to write their own liquor licenses in June 1955. License in hand, they opened Anthony’s Steakhouse, which later became Sargent’s, now Parallel 47.
“Since then, the city of Hayden Lake hasn’t really grown much because it’s pretty confined,” Hayden Historic Preservation Commissioner Lee Zink said. “But Hayden has grown a lot.”
The details of that story, and many others, will be available in a book that will provide a biographical history of the oldest and founding families in the city.
The first draft of the book should be ready for review in August and is set to release in the fall.
It will tell stories of Hayden Lake and Hayden families from the Steele cabin to the Stoddard Barn. But more than that, the book will be used as a baseline for future projects in the city of Hayden, Community and Economic Development Director Donna Phillips said.
The city established the Hayden Historic Preservation Commission to create a record of Hayden’s history. Roughly 15 years ago, the book was commissioned by the city, when Commissioner Judy Eichelberger began collecting the research.
Though Eichelberger spearheaded the project, she couldn’t do it on her own.
Eichelberger asked Barbara Bennett to become a commissioner and write a book for the city. Bennett agreed to do it after she retired. She began conducting family interviews with second and third-generation family members.
“My first interview was Valentine’s Day 2012,” Bennet said. “I became a commissioner in 2011 and from then on that was what I did.”
Since then, Bennett has been chasing tales of family drama, asking surviving members of the oldest families of Hayden for information.
“What was interesting to me was that I had to go into the second and third generations in order to do the first generations,” Bennett said. “But I knew a lot of the second and third-generation people. A lot of them. And I just like them all.”
Bennett, 86, was born and raised in Hayden and has an office crammed with decades of research and interviews.
“We did have some bootleggers on Hayden Lake,” Bennett said. “They would take their wares and put it in a boat and take it over to Honeysuckle Beach. Apparently, one of the boats got sunk. Well, it had a whole bunch of booze on it. This is just what I hear now.”
In her younger days, Bennett scuba-dived to the bottom of Hayden Lake to fact-check that rumor and validate the bootlegging history of Honeysuckle Beach. She’s traveled the county to track down family histories.
The city of Hayden digitizes the information for preservation, with help from Historic Preservation Commission members. The city also hosts events, like Grandparents' Day, to reach more families and connect the commissioners to other sources of history.
Eichelberger cross-references Bennett’s notes with information on Ancestry.com and historical data and verifies the facts of the family narratives.
“We have to give Judy (Eichelberger) huge amounts of credit for trying to ensure that we don’t get a lot of conflicting storytelling,” Phillips said.
Phillips is also the city clerk on the commission because the city’s history is something close to her heart.
Bennett and Eichelberger, with support from the Preservation Commission, then compiled the information into binders of narratives and vignettes of over 70 family histories, with pictures. Those vignettes were sent to Gray Dog Printing in Spokane, where the first draft will be printed soon.
When complete, the book will be a textbook for elementary school history curriculum in local schools. Historical points of interest will be used to map hiking trails, walkways or paths, with site markers throughout the city based on significant locations in the book. And historical sites will be preserved to protect the city’s past.
Preservation projects are already in development based on early historical research for the book, like the Stoddard Barn.
Despite being diagnosed with macular degeneration, Bennett continues her work conducting interviews, and working on the research for the second and third books of Hayden.
The first book includes stories from the earliest settlers. The second book will create a narrative timeline of Hayden’s history. And the ones after that will include over a decade of Bennett’s research.
