Richard Palmer never imagined he would return to his first home from over 40 years ago and renovate it.
However, as a building contractor, he was commissioned by the new owners of the house to renovate the exterior façade of the thThe historic home of Daniel Morgan. or more commonly the Whitehouse on Manito or the Manito White House, prominently located at the southeast corner of Grand Boulevard and Manito Place.
Last month, Spokane-based Mike Walsh Construction Company LLC began work on the historic home at 242 E. Manito Place for about $160,000. Palmer and Mike Walsh are tearing out the 115-year-old porch and replacing the large 20-foot-tall columns that stand at the home’s entrance and support a canopy that extends over the porch and second-floor veranda. The 10 smaller 8-foot-tall columns that Sentence evenly along the porch and support the porch on the second floor Also
will be replaced with materials that can withstand the weather in the Pacific Northwest bettersays Palmer.
“You know you’re getting old when Mother Nature has reclaimed the work you did in your youth,” says Palmer, 68. “But we were poor students and couldn’t afford to replace all the pillars. These pillars are now showing the world that it’s time to remove them.”
Walsh says there are a few options for replacing the columns, such as prefabricated fiberglass, stone or composite materials. As he and Palmer assessed the condition of the columns, it became clear that the porch and upper deck gutter system needed to be restored. If no more projects are added to the renovation list, he estimates the work will be completed by October.
“Everything that was exposed to the elements just got eaten away and decayed,” says Walsh. “In some places you could pierce through it with your hand.”
The Hazleton family currently owns the Manito White House. Rebecca Hazleton met Palmer through her neighbors. She first asked Palmer if he could convert the walkway – which ran from the east side of the sidewalk to the middle of the house – into a straight walkway from the curve to the porch. After that was done, she hired Palmer and Walsh to do more work.
“It’s good to have the restoration work done by someone who knows and loves the house,” says Hazleton.
Palmer founded his construction company, Nomads Construction LLC, in 2016 after working for 30 years as a systems engineer at Apple. Nomads stands for “nice old men who actually do something,” because he says he never really wants to retire. About two years ago, he sold the company for $100,000 to Walsh, who has since renamed it. The company has three full-time employees, with Palmer working part-time. The company has built homes near Kendall Yards and has about half a dozen projects in the works. Since the pandemic, they’ve been busy with renovations, Walsh says.
“When you start doing these things, word gets around and your phone just doesn’t stop ringing,” he says.
When they began applying for permits to renovate the Manito White House, they quickly discovered that because it has been a historic site since 2012, their renovations would have to be reviewed by the Spokane City-County Historic Preservation Office to obtain a “certificate of appropriateness” before they could even be granted a permit.
According to Megan Duvall, historic preservationist, the Certificate of Suitability is required for any property listed on the Spokane Register of Historic Places or within a Spokane Historic DistrictThe office pays attention to certain things such as color and quality of materials.
The Manito White House was built in 1909 for Daniel Morgan, an entrepreneur, developer and Washington State Senator from Spokane, according to the Historic Preservation Office. The house sits on a 1/3-acre lot and faces north, overlooking the eastern portion of Manito Park.
It has about 6,000 square feet of space, including a basement and an unfinished 1,200-square-foot attic with high ceilings that could be converted into a ballroom, Palmer says. The house has five bedrooms, three bathrooms and three fireplaces. On the ground floor, a wide entrance leads to a library and a grand staircase, and the west wing addition is frequently used as a bedroom. The interior of the house is paneled with Philippine mahogany and its ceilings are decorated with carved plaster, Palmer says.
-Karina EliasRichard Palmer owned the Manito White House in the 1980s and converted it from a duplex to a single-family home.
According to the Historic Preservation Office, the Manito White House was added to the Spokane Register of Historic Places as “an outstanding example of a neoclassical residential house in Spokane” and is an important example of the residential work of renowned architects Harold C. Whitehouse and George H. Keith. The nomination notes that the house has maintained its integrity in terms of location, design and workmanship. The nomination application, submitted by Pete Chase, the former owner of the Manito White House, references 1909 newspaper articles describing the house as the most expensive house built in the Manito Park District in 1909, with an “expressive interior and elegant finish.” According to a nomination letter from the Historic Preservation Office, Morgan had purchased the property in 1902 for $2,016 and built the house for $16,000.
Palmer lived across Grand Boulevard in the early 1980s and, on his daily runs, often saw an elderly, elegantly dressed woman tending her roses in front of the Manito White House. Eventually, he became friends with Margaret Hebberd, who had received the house as a wedding gift from her husband during the Great Depression. According to the Historic Preservation Office, the house was purchased by the Hebberds in a foreclosure settlement in 1931 for $13,500. Before that, the house had passed through several owners over two decades and was used as a soup kitchen and flophouse during the Great Depression, according to Historic Preservation Office records.
By the time Palmer met Hebberd, she was already a widow and had converted the house into a duplex. When Palmer found out, he told Hebberd that he would love to live there if it ever became available.
“About six months later, she called me and said it was available,” Palmer says. “My wife and I thought we had died and gone to heaven when we rented the second floor in that house.”
At the time, Palmer was a barber, making a living cutting mullets and big ’80s haircuts, he says. His wife studied psychology and earned her doctorate. Hebberd and her husband were high society, traveling the world and buying furniture for their store, Tull & Gibbs, a four-story furniture store in downtown Spokane, Palmer says. Hebberd was also one of the founders of the Spokane Civic Theater and devoted a lot of time to it, he says.
Eventually, Hebberd began showing signs of dementia and had to move into a nursing home. Before she moved out, she made it known that she wanted the Palmers to own the house. Hebberd’s daughter added up the work Palmer had done, such as mowing the lawn and replacing the water heater, and gave them a large credit, he says. She also deducted work that still needed to be done on the house and sold the house to the Palmers in 1982 for $111,000.
“The day we bought it, we sat across the street looking at it and just thought, ‘How are we going to make $650 a month?'” Palmer recalls. “We had no furniture to furnish it and couldn’t afford to heat it… but eventually we started making money and had three small children.”
The Palmers lived in the Manito White House for 10 years, during which time they undertook several renovation and preservation projects, including converting the then duplex into a single-family home, replacing two of the 20-foot-tall columns, updating plumbing and electrical lines, applying fresh paint, and repairing the glasswork that adorns the wooden front door. They sold it in 1992 for $250,000.
Palmer has gotten to know all of the owners over the past three decades, who are always interested in learning more about the history of the house.
After Palmer, a southern gentleman named George French, who had made his fortune in commercial real estate, lived in the White House in Manito for about 15 years. He became “Grandpa George” and like a member of the family, Palmer says. French collected antique clocks, had the ceilings carved in plaster and called the house “Tierra Bella” (beautiful country).
Spokane entrepreneur Pete Chase, best known as co-founder of telecommunications cabinet maker Purcell Systems Inc., purchased the Manito White House in 2009 for $498,000, public records show. He is credited with renovating the home and having it listed on the city’s historic register.
The Hazletons bought the house in 2019 for $925,000. Hazleton says the previous owners left behind binders of notes detailing nearly a century of work and the home’s history. She plans to continue caring for the historic home and fill the binders with records.
Palmer, who is proud of the glasswork he did on the house, says he might open a stained glass studio.
