Today's story is a fun one. A few months ago we did a story about hidden portals to Boise history – or places around town that you probably have been to and didn't realize had history behind them. Julie is back with part two. Listen to it on the podcast. Enjoy!

Hidden History Portals (Part II)

By Julie Sarasqueta

Remember that story I did a while back about Boise’s Hidden Portals? History nerd that I am, I had too many to include in just one article — and my ever-benevolent editor has indulged my whim to provide another installation. The spots below are located in plain sight, but they’re remnants of our collective history as a city, little windows into the past just begging to be looked through.

The Pioneer Tent and Awning Building (and Horse)

Pioneer Tent and Awning, with its cutout metal horse perched high above the building, is where the Boise of the 19th century and the Boise of the 20th century would meet.

But to get to that point, we have to back up a bit to August 2, 1862, one of the most transformative days in Idaho history. Up on what would become known as Grimes Creek, just about 50 miles northeast of Boise, Moses Splawn, George Grimes, and a small group of fellow prospectors came upon a placer deposit. And where there is placer — a cache of heavily eroded minerals — there is gold.

The Idaho gold rush was on.

Boise was perfectly positioned to provide the infrastructure for the rapidly growing area, including canvas tents. If you’ve seen old pics from the Civil War or the pioneer days in Idaho, you know what I’m talking about — big, tightly-woven canvas tents that could keep out the driving sun and rain and provide shelter until either the load was exhausted or a more permanent wood-and-brick settlement could be built.

Pioneer Tent and Awning, founded at the turn of the 20th century, served miners with those tents. In 1910, the business was prosperous enough to warrant its own new brick building on the corner of 6th and Main streets.

By the time the building was completed, the business was transitioning from serving miners with tents and saddlery supplies to providing automobile drivers with a must-have accessory. Early cars lacked the metal tops that we take for granted now, so canvas tops were added to vehicles to protect drivers from wind and rain and snow.

That’s not to say that the company stopped mankind tents and saddlery supplies; they did, but Idaho residents began camping en masse for fun rather than fortune. You could step into Pioneer Tent and Awning with your own specifications for a tent and the employees would make it to order.

By 1972, though, Old Boise was a bit run down, a remnant of a bygone time with bygone needs. Pioneer Tent and Awning closed its doors. In 1974 — during an era when Boise seemed bent on scrubbing out its own history — preservationist Joan Carley purchased the building. The awning-studded building with its signature horse sign lives on.

The Trolley House

Back in the early 1920s, the building that has housed the Trolley House restaurant on Warm Springs was a working part of Boise’s transportation system. The cute, cottage-style 1922 structure was a dispatch station for Boise streetcars, conveniently located next to one of the biggest attractions in town: the long-gone, much-celebrated Natatorium, a huge Moorish-style swimming palace with pools that stayed warm all year long thanks to the geothermal waters beneath Warm Springs Avenue.

From the moment it was built, the building’s days as a transportation feature were numbered. Cars were becoming cheaper and more accessible, and by 1928 the transportation system it served had gone bust. Luckily, it was a cute building on one of Boise’s most fashionable streets, and an enterprising entrepreneur converted it into a restaurant. It has been a bar or restaurant ever since.

Of course, it’s not the only remnant of Boise’s once-extensive streetcar system. You can see it in the wide lanes of Harrison Boulevard, for instance; during road construction in 2018, workers unearthed metal tracks around 16th and State streets that had been buried for 100 years. Seeing them in a twisted lump on the side of the road, it was hard not to think what it would be like to have such an extensive system up and running again.

The Trolley House restaurant closed a couple of years ago when the owner since 1976, Victoria Purdy, retired. According to Boise Dev, the building was purchased by Stephen Barbey with the hope of revitalizing the space and the restaurant. It’s still closed for renovations, but hopefully this beloved neighborhood hangout will start serving early risers again soon.

SPONSORED BY THE MORRISON CENTER Coming to a park near you... The ​Neighborhood Concert Series​ is back! This free, family-friendly live music series pops up at different parks all over Boise and features a rotating lineup of local bands and food trucks. Brought to you by The Morrison Center, Lost Grove Brewing, and St. Luke's Health Plan, ​the 2024 Neighborhood Concert Series ​is underway and the next show is tomorrow, July 10! See the schedule here!

The Pantry and Veltex Signs

Tooling down Shoreline Drive, you’ll see a towering, super-1970s sign for the Pantry restaurant, which dished out hamburgers (as advertised on the sign) and family-friendly meals like meatloaf.

The Pantry opened in 1972 and was a family-run restaurant beloved by locals. The building’s design and decor was wonderfully of its era and unpretentious, with great booths equipped with phones so you could call your order directly into the kitchen. Like so many old-school Boise restaurants, it was popular with both middle-class folks and the wealthy alike. Kathryn Albertson, the widow of grocery magnate Joe Albertson, could often be seen dining there — it was just a short distance from her home perched over the park that still bears her name.

Don and Kathy French, the owners, closed the business in 2016, and Agribeef tore the building down to make way for parking for its nearby headquarters. They left the sign, though, as a tribute to another time.

Just over a mile away on 5th Street in Downtown Boise, you can see another beloved sign: an orange-and-blue neon marker that reads “Veltex.” The sign once advertised a Veltex service station, one of about 100 that dotted the Northwest at one time. A gas station stood on that corner from the 1910s all the way to 2002.

The building hadn’t been a working service station since the early 1990s and stood empty from 1998, which is about when developer Bill Clark put forth a proposal to turn the space into a four-story mixed-used building. However, in a nod to Boise history, Clark worked with Fletcher Oil Company, the owner of the Veltex brand, to name the new edifice the Veltex Building. And, of course, he kept the sign, which was restored by Wil Kirkman at Rocket Neon. The condos opened in 2002.

Fort Boise Military Reserve Cemetery

In the Military Reserve area of the Foothills behind Fort Boise, you’ll find a quiet and unassuming little graveyard just off Mountain Cove Road. The Fort Boise Military Reserve Cemetery is the final resting places of approximately 250 people, but their rest has been anything but undisturbed.

The original graves were located on Fort Boise property, where the VA Hospital is located now (if you’ve never been back there to see the original 19th-century buildings, it’s worth a look). The cemetery was established in 1863 and held the remains of veterans from nearly every U.S. conflict of the 19th century: The Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, and the Spanish American wars. Military family members were buried there, too.

A 1906 flood forced the move to its current location. According to a history of the cemetery by the City of Boise, not all the graves were discovered before the original relocation, and soldiers discovered more when they used the original burial ground as a target practice site. Periodically, more bodies would be found, and then moved to the Foothills site. The last burials were in 1998, after three more Civil War-era gravesites were discovered on the original cemetery site.

The Department of Veterans Affairs arranged to transfer the cemetery deed to the City of Boise.

The City of Boise has made a point of stating the cemetery is maintained, despite the presence of native vegetation instead of the clipped lawns we’re used to seeing at military gravesites. The Foothills are especially prone to erosion, and the natural vegetation helps root the land — and prevent another emergency transfer of these souls to yet another location.

It’s a beautiful spot, and a bit jarring if you come upon it unexpectedly. In recent years, the cemetery has become known for its reported paranormal activity, with ghost hunters relaying stories of sightings and the touch of invisible hands.

Whether you believe in ghosts or not, the cemetery has a supernatural ability to transport us to the past — a hidden portal, if you’re willing to walk through it.

Thanks for reading!

With love from Boise,

Marissa

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