https://www.facebook.com/1072208215966321/

Idaho Falls: Noir et Blanc, Idaho Falls, ID (2026)

09/10/2026

William Luxton came from Devonshire, England shortly after the American Civil War in search of fortune in the post-war livestock boom. A young man in his 20’s, he arrived in Idaho Falls roughly at the same time it became known as Idaho Falls, where he shortly thereafter married Matilda, and they were forever after known as Billy and Tillie and Luxton.

Billy’s rise to prominence in Idaho Falls was the embodiment of the American Dream. His fortune was not tied to family money – he didn’t have any. Instead, it was tied to hard work, ambition, and taking chances. What began as work as a butcher was soon leveraged into a meat market with his brother, forming the Luxton Brother’s Meat Market on A Street. They soon became a well-established and well-respected business, and in a few short years, Billy Luxton turned his ambition into fortune, building a top-down meat industry of his own, with cattle, hogs and sheep on a ranch near Menan, a slaughterhouse south of town in the vicinity of 17thStreet now, and a booming market delivering the meat to most of Idaho Falls. Because of this pioneering model of vertical integration (the full supply chain managed in-house), Idaho Falls was often spared shortages when other communities were less fortunate, such as the national meatpacker’s strike in 1946.

The Luxton empire grew, including a professional building on Broadway in 1916 which was best known as the location of the Joy Drug Store. That building was demolished, but it was roughly where the Broadway Plaza is located now, with Lucy’s Pizza, The Rib and Chop House. They built two homes on Ridge Avenue, placing Tillie in the heart of the Idaho Falls social scene.

And…they loved rodeo. They were a ranch family after all, and close friends of the Reno family, who came to own Tautphaus Park. Billy was one of the original founders of the War Bonnet Roundup, helping with the very first rodeos on the grounds of Reno Park, what we know as Tautphaus Park.

That, my friends, is why in 1972, the descendants of Billy and Tillie Luxton, in honor of all that they contributed to make Idaho Falls what it is today, built the Luxton Memorial Fountain on the grounds of Tautphaus Park.

Those of us who grew up here know this fountain as the place to pour liquid soap and turn it into a bubble fountain, something I haven’t seen for some time (which is good, kids…don’t get any ideas!) And help me out, but I seem to remember that at times it was surreptitiously painted orange or blue as part of the never-ending IF/Skyline rivalry…or did I make that part up?

I took these photos last year, which is a good thing, as I don’t believe the fountain is running at the moment, perhaps to conserve water in a bad water year…

09/09/2026

I periodically get asked if I happen to have a book...and the answer is yes! I actually had the book first, but the nature of the project demanded more, and that has grown into this online project. However, the format is the same: Paul takes photo, then Paul talks about it, sometimes too much.

Point is, I just delivered new, signed copies to Winnie & Mo's Bookshop on A street downtown, and the Idaho Falls Chamber of Commerce Visitor Gift shop on River Parkway across from the falls. If you need a gift for yourself or someone who loves Idaho Falls, go support one of our small businesses! (They do sell out, so...😉)

If you aren't local, they are also available at Barnes & Noble online, but alas, they do not have the charm that comes with me scribbling my name like a third-grader inside the cover...

Either way, they're $38.99.

That ends my commercial!

(And will i have second book? Also yes! But I have to make time that is currently consumed by this project!)

09/09/2026

When I was growing up, there were two professions that were always uttered with a degree of deference, because they were presumed to be smarter than the rest of us, and they were presumed to make a lot more money than the rest of us: Doctors and Lawyers. Doctors saved your life when you thought it was over, and lawyers outsmarted everyone by figuring out the obscure loophole. Who can forget when Perry Mason threw his briefcase on the courtroom floor? Oh, wait…that was Mike Brady from the Brady Bunch. Still, Perry Mason always pulled through with a last-minute surprise witness that would blow the prosecution’s murder case to smithereens and leave those of us in TV land gob smacked by his genius.

I don’t have any doctors in my family, but I happen to have spawned a couple of lawyers, and subsequently, I have a little insight into them. The truth is, I like lawyers. I find them cynical, generally funny, kind of jaded on much of humanity, but they’re good for a thoughtful discussion, and sometimes their advice is pretty darn useful. Thankfully I haven’t needed one for anything more than setting up a will and babysitting my dogs when I leave for a long trip…

Idaho Falls, like anywhere else, has a full slate of attorneys and judges and clerks and all the things a city needs to deliver jurisprudence as required. Our county courthouse is a historic building constructed between 1919 and 1921, providing some solid infrastructure wherein to prosecute the bootleggers, gamblers, and other ne'er-do-wells that a growing frontier town like ours seemed to have in abundance. The buildings of old downtown often had office space in the upstairs, and many of our early attorneys scattered about town and could easily walk to the courthouse.

In roughly 1941, this mashup of mid-century modern and streamline moderne known as the Dennis Building was built on the corner of Capital and C Street (aka Constitution Ave.), and though its intent is not retained in the obvious record, its use was singular: attorney offices directly across the street from the courthouse.

My own attorney kids have not had their office here, but I bet they would have appreciated the proximity on a snowy, windy February court day…

09/08/2026

Shortly after the turn of the century, Albert Wackerli brought his family from Iowa to Idaho Falls. Born in 1862 and a farmer by trade, he no doubt heard about the promise of the canals that could water the fields around Idaho Falls regardless of the weather, and that promise was enough to bring his family out west. By 1905 he had constructed a lovely Queen Anne home on 10th Street in the recently opened Crow’s Addition, and his family began putting down roots.

Roots that remain today.

His sons were less interested in farming, and more interested in transitioning the Wackerli family business to real estate and commercial ventures. That legacy continues to the present era with a couple of automobile dealerships. If you want a GMC truck, a Cadillac, or a Subaru, there’s a good chance you’re going to buy one from the Wackerli’s if you shop locally.

“So what about the apartments in the photo, Paul?” you are probably asking.

When the LDS Hospital was constructed in 1923 it established the first “medical hub” for Idaho Falls. It was a hospital of sizable proportion and included a staff that was sized to the task. Nurses and others needed a place to live, and when these apartments were built three years later, they were a welcome sight for employees who might not be ready, able or interested in building a home, and who were grateful to be so close to the hospital. They were luxurious apartments, and residents included multiple owners of the building over the years.

However…plot twist…it was not the Wackerli’s who built the apartments, even though the family was well established here by then. These apartments were known as the Shane Apartments, built by another Idaho Falls name we recently discussed: Alvin Shane, of the Shane Building fame. Wackerli’s purchased the building in 1945 and changed the name to reflect their ownership. They sold it ten years later, but for reasons known only to the new owners, the name hasn’t changed since 1945.

The Wackerli family is a name we all know if we’ve lived here very long, and though I confess to know zero Wackerli’s personally, I’ve been aware for some time of the prominent role they’ve played in Idaho Falls…I just didn’t realize it goes all the way back to just after the turn of the last century…

09/07/2026

What you see is not what Charles Tautphaus built. But it’s related. Probably. I’ve had a really hard time figuring this sucker out.

There is a history of Tautphaus Park written by local historian, James (Jim) Bennett, in which there is a very old photograph of the overflow spillway from the lake that Charles Tautphaus built on his property. Many of you already know the history of the park, and how it once had a 6-acre lake where the Sunken Ball Diamond sits today. However, in that old photo is a “fountain” that sits at the base of the spillway, and it appears to be nothing more than a pipe sticking straight up out of the canal.

I’m gonna take a stab at what that is.

Because the surface of the lake was well above the top of the pipe, a clever engineer like Charles Tautphaus could have run a length of pipe from the bottom of his lake, through the berm that held the lake back, and then turned 90 degrees into the air for roughly 6-8 feet. The hydrostatic pressure from the lake would have generated a “fountain” that behaved like an artesian well, something that would have been novel, interesting, but not terribly important.

Fast forward to 1947 when the lake was filled in and the canal was diverted around it. Someone (likely a City Engineer) decided to drop the canal from the height the lake was once to the level at the bottom of the Park via a new concrete spillway in roughly the same place that the lake spilled out, and the pipe fountain that was there was built into something a little more elaborate, with a stone base and the tiered top. The whole thing makes for a quaint, peaceful little scene in an out-of-the-way part of the park. I don’t know if it runs off the principle of hydrostatic pressure from the canal that is roughly ten feet higher, or if it is less interesting. I have read that the city can turn it off, however, I can’t vouch for that. My gut tells me it runs when the canal runs, and stops when the canal stops, suggesting that it could still be a hydrostatic pressure fountain.

What I don’t think is true is that it was built by Charles to please his wife, who loved the sound of running water. The spillway from the lake would have overwhelmed the sound of this little fountain. But that story is more romantic…and my story might be way off-base.

09/06/2026

In 1999, our family van T-boned a Pontiac at the intersection of Sunnyside and Hitt Road. The Pontiac was driven by a very drunk driver, and though our car needed extensive repair, we were unhurt, and shrugged it off with a glib, “Hitt happens.”

Thankfully, Hitt DID happen, when Minnie Gibson Hitt arrived on the train in Eagle Rock at the age of 17. The year was 1889, and she needed work to support her mother and younger sister. That opportunity came at the Anderson Brother’s General Store. However, once it grew clear that Minnie was good with numbers, she became a cashier and a teller at the Anderson’s Bank. That would prove to be one of the most important promotions that ever happened in Idaho Falls.

Minnie would become the first lady banker in the entire region. She was famous for measuring a man’s character, often by the callouses she could feel when she shook his hand. Her sense led to sound loans, and shrewd investments. Her judgement and common sense were instrumental in financing the growing city.

As a founding member of the Village Improvement Society, she also wielded considerable influence, mostly quietly from behind the more vocal ladies, and was critical in ensuring the financial backing for much of the work of the VIS. Among her most important victories was working to shut down the brothels on the little island in the river that we know today as the Japanese Friendship Garden.

It was her husband, Frank, that lent her the last name of Hitt, and they were a formidable pair in the social circles of Idaho Falls. She a powerful banker, he a successful sheep rancher (made possible thanks to the financial backing of his lovely wife…) Together they built this spectacular Queen Ann style home on Ridge Avenue, a testament to her good taste and insistence on some of the finer things, even in a frontier town.

After Frank died and Minnie decided to move to California, she sold the house to someone else we’ve already talked about here: George Samsel, who built the Ferrell’s building and others downtown. Samsel actually lived here longer than the Hitt’s did, but we remember it as the home of one of the most remarkable women to ever walk the streets of Idaho Falls.

09/05/2026

I’ve been challenged a time or two when I describe where we live as a high desert…but it is. It’s easy to lose sight of that, however, because in our day, everywhere we look we find trees, green lawns, and the fields around us produce grain and potatoes (and for some reason this year, corn?) all of it supported by irrigation.

Like, literally all of it.

Without the surface water diverted from the Snake River, and the groundwater pumped from the Snake River Aquifer, Idaho Falls would quickly return to its native state: a high, arid desert.

The people who settled Eagle Rock in the mid-1800’s encountered territory that seems foreign to us today. We know of places around here that look like it once did, particularly those who are familiar with Hell’s Half Acre between here and Blackfoot, or who drive to the INL Site regularly. But we forget that that’s what it looked like here, too, before the early pioneers undertook the process of harnessing the water and turning us into the so-called “City of Destiny.”

Today there aren’t very many places in Idaho Falls that look like it once did…but there are a few, and Wednesday I went out and scraped up my legs pretty good meandering around one of the biggest ones I know, the stretch of riverwalk between the John’s Hole Bridge and Russell Freeman Park. There you’ll find the lava rock gorge of the river, the basalt covered in lichens of green and orange. There’s sagebrush, prickly pear, native grasses, and sadly, a bunch of trash that people have dumped over the years.

It’s sad to see the disdain with which people treat that spot. The riverbank is littered with plastic bottles and worm tubs, and the land has multiple dump sites. My guess is that attitude stems from the misguided mindset that “undeveloped” is tantamount to “worthless,” but I disagree. If I could wave a magic wand, I would turn that whole area into a fully formed extension of the Greenbelt rather than a mere pass-through between greener parks. Not for lush, verdant lawns and non-native trees, but as an homage to the land the way it was when the Shoshone knew it, before the days of Eagle Rock, and celebrate our high arid desert rather than loathe it.

09/04/2026

New York was a long way from Eagle Rock in the late 1800’s, but Kate Baker didn’t make the journey all at once. After graduating with a degree in English Literature from Syracuse, she left New York for Nebraska and then a professorship in Iowa (if you tell an easterner today that you live in Idaho, they’re likely to furrow their brow, think, and then ask, “You mean Iowa?”). Iowa was where she met Bowen Curley, but the lure of the far west called them, and in 1892, when Kate was 42, they uprooted to Idaho Falls.

She described her new home simply. “It’s the dustiest place I’ve ever been.” It was also a rough and dirty little frontier town that seemed harsh to a woman refined by eastern culture and a university education.

When Idaho became just the fourth State to grant suffrage to women – as well as the progressive suite of other rights including property ownership, divorce and child custody – Kate understood that it would require some education of her sisters in Idaho Falls to help them understand the civic power that had just been handed them, and she formed the “Nineteenth Century Club,” in response, and served as its first president.

And those ladies transformed Idaho Falls into something we can easily imagine today, but only because it’s very difficult to imagine the sagebrush, sand, dust and wind that prevailed here at the end of the 19th century. They rebranded themselves as the Village Improvement Society or VIS for short, and established a system of trash collection, street naming, house numbering, sidewalks, built the library, established a hospital, and were hostile to the vices of a frontier town, like gambling and prostitution.

But Kate believed in parks. And she loved trees. Trees that would provide shade to her home, trees that would line the streets, trees that would make Idaho Falls – better. The trees that line the streets of old Idaho Falls take your breath away in the fall – because Kate loved trees.

She died of cancer only 10 years after her arrival, and to honor her, the ladies of the VIS planted trees in a place that at the time was little more than range for cattle. They planted them in abundance. And named the place Kate Curley Park.

Janet and I enjoyed a picnic with the “reimagined” VIS on Monday, shaded by Kate’s trees in the park named in her honor. The streets around her park are beautiful, lined by both trees and sidewalks. When we walked to her home on the corner of Maple and Ridge, I couldn’t help but realize how proud she would have been of the big, mature trees, and the recently spruced-up sidewalks. Her town is so much more beautiful because of Kate Curley and the women of the VIS.

09/03/2026

A signal light goes off inside the Idaho Motor Company on Eastern Avenue on a summer evening in 1927. The man in the office nods to the driver, who takes the keys off the hook and heads out to the truck that was already loaded hours ago. He checks overhead…the plane is circling, but all indications are clear. The driver fires up the engine and pulls out onto Eastern on his way to the Havana Cigar Company for a delivery. Jack Robinson, owner of the store, was taking delivery from the “Bootleg King of Idaho,” Clay Roselle. Their customers were “thirsty.” And their “customers” were all over the western United States.

A veteran of WWI, Roselle was likely more than just a businessman on the wrong side of the law. Like many men in his situation, he was probably also a pugnacious objector to the whole notion of prohibition. Violating the temperance laws was as common as a sneeze in most communities, not the least of which was Washington, D.C., and the speakeasy beneath the Havana Cigar Co. was almost certainly frequented by prominent community members and city leaders. There is record of only one raid, and none of the customers' names were published. I suspect that was for good reason.

The feds would finally catch up with Roselle in 1928, and he spent nearly three years behind bars. Once released, he wound up bootlegging near Dillon, Montana, where he eventually ended up on the wrong end of the barrel of a gun fired by a one-eyed, one-legged bartender with a bad temper. That ignominiously ended the career of one of the biggest bootleg operators in the entire intermountain west.

It is, therefore, an amusing twist of fate that the Havana Cigar Co., a front for one of the biggest and most successful illegal liquor operations in the entire western region would one day become a charming, perfectly legal, wine and beer shop on Park Avenue. The one we all know as Marcellars Vintage Wine and Brews. What was once the source of a great deal of “undesirable publicity for Idaho Falls,” has become one of downtown’s most important little stores. Sometimes the circle closes in curious ways…

Thanks to Chloe Doucette at the Museum of Idaho for sharing this colorful history with me!

09/02/2026

Alvin Shane came to Eagle Rock from Wisconsin in 1889, spending enough time in Salt Lake City to get married and start his family. But when word got south that there was genuine agricultural promise in the arid desert of the Snake River Plain if they could just get the water out of the Snake River and into the fields, Alvin made a decision that changed the course of his life and ours: he moved to Eagle Rock and set about to change the course of water.

Alvin’s skills were in engineering and land surveying, and he and a few other men spent years on horseback around Eagle Rock (which became Idaho Falls two years after he arrived) laying out the lines for the Great Western and Osgood Canal systems. He understood the topography and the mechanics well enough to lead the engineering effort to build a pump plant that could raise the critical water 550 feet, high enough to spread the “liquid gold” of water to the desert well above the river.

Alvin Shane would go on to be remembered for many things, but what mattered most was the water. Once the canals were working, the population of Idaho Falls boomed, drawing farmers – and critically – investors from back east to help grow Idaho Falls. His leadership got him elected to be Mayor of Idaho Falls, and then later Postmaster General. But his success led him to begin his real estate ventures. In 1915, Alvin Shane completed his namesake and legacy building on Shoup Avenue in downtown Idaho Falls.

And it was grand. Two color tones of brick with elaborate terracotta ornamentation created a sensational building, and one that the town was proud of, considering it as much a work of public art as it was a practical structure. It was built to house retail stores on the main floor and professional offices upstairs. And to me, it looks like it was built to withstand an earthquake, too.

Alvin’s pioneering contributions were enough that he was granted “Lifetime Membership” to the Idaho Falls Chamber of Commerce. And in a fitting ode to all that he did to develop Idaho Falls, his building is home to the Idaho Falls Downtown Development Corporation, the very folks who ensure that his legacy, and that of all our downtown pioneers, persists.

Idaho Falls: Noir et Blanc

09/10/2026

09/09/2026

09/09/2026

09/08/2026

09/07/2026

09/06/2026

09/05/2026

09/04/2026

09/03/2026

09/02/2026

Address

Website

Alerts

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Listing takedown request