A pioneer treasure sits deteriorating along the White Pass Highway as thousands of motorists zip past, entirely unaware that the abandoned two-story house at Ethel is listed on the Washington Heritage Register.
I never knew it until Dan Forrest of Morton e-mailed, expressing concern about the Lindeman cabin’s dilapidated roof and hoping someone could “keep it from rotting away.” Forrest said he learned about the historic home from co-worker Tony Dalmeny of Ethel, who rented it two decades ago.
“It is an amazing method of construction of a log cabin and should be preserved,” Forrest said.
The home is the handiwork of German native Paul Lindeman, who started a flower shop in San Francisco and married his German sweetheart, Doris Cheerman, in 1867, according to “The History of Lewis County, WA” published by Alma Nix and her son, John, in 1985. The Lindemans ran a grocery store in California before moving to Washington, lured by tales of great wheat harvests in the Palouse, the Nix book said. But they disliked the cold winters there.
So, in the mid-1880s, Lindeman traveled west and found land at what today is Ethel, where he lived in an old lean-to while constructing a sturdy house from a nearby grove of virgin cedar trees. His wife and three sons — William, Rudolph, and Edward — joined him when it was finished.
Lindeman used two-foot-wide thick hand-hewn timbers for the walls of the salt-box-shaped house. He didn’t use nails, only wedge cut joints at the corners and tightly spaced timbers throughout. The upstairs floor is anchored with notch supports visible from outside. The cabin has always featured white-trimmed windows.
The home has had few modifications — a permanent rear addition for the kitchen and porch, added in 1914, and a small front porch built in 1936, said Glen Lindeman of Pullman, great-grandson of the home’s builder. He nominated the cabin in 1976 for the National Register of Historic Places.
“If I was still living over there in Lewis County, I would have tried to restore it,” said Lindeman, editor-in-chief of WSU Press. “It’s looking pretty sad.”
Paul Lindeman served as Ethel postmaster for 35 years, until his death in 1924.
The cabin later housed his son, Rudy, who with his wife, Margaret Bowers Lindeman, raised six girls and three boys there. Glen Lindeman said they operated a dairy farm and his grandfather worked as “a jack-of-all-trades, raising grain, logging, selling milk.”
Before her death in 1980, Margaret sold the home to Roscoe Perry, owner of Perry’s Grocery at Ethel. His children now own it.
Wayne Perry of Ethel and his brother and sister recently listed the property for sale, asking $800,000 for 61 acres containing the cabin, the Ethel store, a restaurant and a mobile home park.
The highway frontage is the most valuable, which is where the cabin sits.
Perry tried to find a nonprofit organization or government agency to move the old cabin and restore it, but nobody had the money.
“It’s probably just going to fall down,” he said. “I hate to see it happen. I even tried to think how a guy could use it in conjunction with something else.”
He suggested fixing the old house as a restaurant entrance, but his business partner siblings didn’t like the idea.
“I wouldn’t mind fixing it up and furnishing some of the money, but the others — they don’t live around here,” he said. “They don’t see the value of it.
“It’s part of the region’s history.”
•••
Julie McDonald Zander, a personal historian from Toledo, can be reached at memoirs@chaptersoflife.com.
