Welcome to No Place Like Home

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In 1988 seven houses were torn down to make room for an expanded playfield at Whitworth School. The school district and many Whitworth families had long argued that Whitworth -- a thriving, popular elementary school at the time -- needed more space for its 600+ students. The building was 70 years old and, according to a letter written at the time by parent Kay Godefroy, "Whitworth has been outdated, seismically unsafe, too small and generally unacceptable for 25-30 years. We cannot continue in the present facility." The neighbors, remembering the days when nearly 900 kids went there, argued that there was plenty of room, and that the district’s capital budget would be better spent on renovating the existing building than tearing down people’s homes. One neighbor said she felt like "a tree being uprooted." Another called the district "the new bully on the block." The struggle was bitter; ultimately the district prevailed and the houses came down.

Twenty years later, the school is home to Orca, an alternative K-8 school. The playfield's expanse of grass gives no hint of the site's contentious history, or of the seven vanished homes that once stood there. This spring, six middle school students and a local historian decided to find out a little bit more about these houses. From property records, photographs, newspaper articles, city directories, letters, and other primary sources, they gathered evidence about the houses and their occupants. They compared the school district’s “official” history with the stories they heard from neighbors who remembered the old school and the houses that got torn down.

Then the students sat down and imagined scenes and stories that might have taken place in the houses, based on the documentation they had collected. All of the stories presented here are connected to actual pieces of historical evidence – though as you will see some of them stretch well beyond the known facts and into the realm of imagination.

Part of what these students learned – along with lessons about interpreting property records and conducting oral histories – is that history is always an act of imagination. We hope the stories we tell about the past are as grounded as possible in documented fact, but the historic record is always full of holes, and it is the job of the historian to fill them in: to weave an incomplete string of documented facts into a coherent story.

One of the students once looked up from the story she was writing about Sidney Hildahl, the widowed firefighter who once lifted a car off a man trapped beneath it, and wondered aloud: “What if fifty years from now someone comes along and does this to us?” We hope the people whose lives are imagined here would enjoy the stories we have created, even if they don’t reflect reality. (And if anyone has information that might help us capture the past more accurately, please let us know!) Even our most fanciful tales are meant to honor these vanished homes and the lives of the people who lived in them.

-- Mikala Woodward


Coming Soon: Stories from the Vanished Houses!
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