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History:
Dave
Steele knew when he purchased his home at 2511 W. Maxwell in
Nettleton’s Addition, that it had been moved across the street
from its original location around 1900. What Steele didn’t know
was that his home was designed by the architectural firm of Cutter
& Poetz. Built around 1891, this simple two-story home was one
of the earliest residential homes designed by the pair of local
architects. Listed as demolished by author Henry C. Matthews in his
book on Kirtland Cutter, Archit ect
in the Land of Promise, the home was actually moved to its
current location and utilized as a temporary residence for
homeowners Waldo and Louise Paine. Originally constructed at 2509 W.
Summit Boulevard for Waldo G. Paine, a railroad manager, and his
wife Louise Nettleton Paine, the home was rolled on logs around 1900
to 2511 W. Maxwell, a residential lot immediately behind the
home’s original location. There Waldo and Louise lived until a new
house was constructed for them on the old site on Summit. Designed
by local prominent architect W.W. Hyslop, the Paines moved into
their new abode in 1906 and sold the old home in that same year to a
dentist, A. Starke Oliver.
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Steele
learned of his home’s association with architects Kirtland Cutter
and John C. Poetz after reading about the current Paine
House on W. Summit on the Nettleton’s
Addition website. A quick cross-check with the Northwest
Museum of Arts & Culture turned up original house plans of
his home on W. Maxwell, signed by Cutter & Poetz.
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Born
in St. Paul, Minneapolis on June 23, 1859, John C. Poetz, a young
architect and draftsman, came to Spokane from Los Angeles in 1888.
Poetz had spent seven years in the midwest studying construction
under H. Sackville Trehern, a prominent civil engineer. What Cutter
possessed in social graces and connection, Poetz did not. In
Matthews’ book Kirtland
Cutter: Architect in the Land of Promise, the author writes that
Poetz “lacked his employer’s privileged education…imagination
or knowledge of art…but he could supply what the fledgling
architect lacked; experience of the building process and its
management.” By August 1889, Cutter had formed a partnership with
Poetz and they were already working on several commissions,
including the Cyrus Burns house and the Theodore Cushing building
downtown on the northwest corner of Sprague and Howard.
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Before
the Cushing building was complete, however, fire swept through Spoka.jpg) ne, leaving in its wake a sea of white tents which replaced
downtown buildings destroyed by fire. The Cushing building, with
only two floors complete, was destroyed as well. Cutter and Poetz
were quickly commissioned to rebuild the First National Bank for
Cutter’s uncle Horace and James Glover, and the Rookery Block on
the southeast corner of Riverside and Howard, which consisted of the
Spokane National Bank, the Whitehouse Company, and Augustine, Bean,
and Hoyt, a law firm.
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Another
post-fire commission, the First National Bank, a six-story block
with a pyramidal roof constructed in rusticated red Lake Superior
sandstone, upon its completion became the new home for Cutter and
Poetz’s office. Both architects quickly set to the task of
designing the interior of their office on the fifth floor. By 1890,
a year after the fire, Cutter and Poetz were still working on
commissions and began designing a building for John Sherwood, who
helped organize the first electric light company, which would later
become the Washington Water Power Company, and the first cable
street railroad. The Sherwood Building, located on Riverside, was a
simple three-story building that featured semicircular inset arches.
The building was replaced in 1916 with another Cutter designed
eight-story structure for Sherwood, which retained the name.
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Cutter
and Poetz continued designing commercial structures to replace those
buildings lost in the fire, and additionally received commissions to
design a number of residential homes for F. Lewis Clark, Idaho
mining magnate James Wardner, Tacoma attorney David K. Stevens, and
Cutter’s sister Laura who had married attorney Henry Hoyt. Cutter
and Poetz’s designs during this time reveal strong influences from
existing Shingle style homes which resulted in elaborate detail such
as finial-topped turrets, steeply pitched rooflines, wood shingle
imbrication, and broad, overhanging eaves.
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The
Pedicord Hotel, also on.jpg)
Riverside, was the duo’s next commercial collaboration in 1892,
and in 1893, Cutter and Poetz won the gold medal for their Idaho
State Pavilion, known simply as the Idaho Building, at the World’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which commemorated the arrival of
Columbus to the “new world”. The Idaho Building was a massive
log and stone three-story rustic cabin that was reminiscent of a
Swiss chalet and featured a basalt foundation, low-pitched gabled
roof with wooden roof shingles held in place by large rocks, a
second-story wrap-around porch, a third-story full-width balcony and
twenty-two different types of lumber from the state of Idaho.
Visitors flocked to the Idaho Building and Cutter and Poetz quickly
gained international fame for their design.
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The
panic of 1893, however, signaled a lull in the rapid post-fire
rebuilding of Spokane and by 1894, the partnership of Cutter and
Poetz had disintegrated. In the year that followed the fire of 1889,
the firm of Cutter and Poetz had completed commissions for
residential and commercial buildings worth more than $600,000. With
Cutter being the idea man, Poetz, in those first years, was the one
that made the ideas reality. Cutter would go on to form a long
partnership with Karl
Malmgren who had worked for the firm for four years by 1894.
Poetz, who was said to have retired following his partnership with
Cutter, worked for the McCaffrey Plumbing Company in the last years
of his life. Poetz’s granddaughter, June L. Wharf, recalls going
to visit her grandfather in a mining camp in Idaho where he stayed
in the 1920s and that it required a trip by both train and jitney
bus. Although Poetz would go on following his partnership with
Cutter to designs buildings on his own, his original architectural
plans were lost during the Depression. Wharf recalls her mother
using the linen backed architectural plans that were kept in an old
steamer trunk as tea towels in hard times. However, the firm of
Cutter and Poetz designed nearly thirty residential and palatial
homes and commercial buildings during their partnership. Many more
designs were never constructed. Some of the other buildings they
designed together include the Glover
Mansion, the F. Rockwood Moore house, the F. Lewis Clark lodge
gate, the Fairmont Cemetery Chapel, the William Quirin Building, the
Taylor Building, the first Waldo Paine house on W. Maxwell, and the
Arlington School in Hillyard.
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To
learn more about Kirtland Cutter, click here.
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