A Glimpse Into the Past

Herb Speller 2 months old, photo recovered in 1992. 

By: Liv Stecker

Black Canyon Fire, early 1920s

a very young Herb Speller near Northport, WA

Hubert Speller's horse drawn logging equipment

  They say that nothing ever changes up in Northport, Washington, but Herb Speller might beg to differ. Born September 12, 1919, to Hubert and Emma Meriam (Hallenius) Speller, Herbert Sidney Speller was the last baby born in the Northport Hospital before it closed the doors. Herb’s father, Hubert, was a logger working out in the Black Canyon area, east of Northport, where the family lived in a cabin that remained standing until the early 1990s. Hubert’s parents (Herb’s grandparents) had homesteaded up on Bodie Mountain, some of the earliest settlers in the Northport area, Hubert’s mother died in childbirth when he was a small child and the boy grew up in the mountains outside of Northport with his father. Hubert and Emma were cut from the strong cloth of hardy pioneer stock, not shirking from the brutal life that turn of the century logging posed. Emma Speller used to take baby Herb, perched on her hip, for a hike up into the steep Black Canyon country to visit Hubert where he was logging. The terrain was rough and one year Hubert lost a team of logging horses over the edge of the canyon. Hauling logs out of the woods on a wagon during the summer and fall or a sledge in the winter was not for the faint of heart, and Herb helped his father in the woods after he graduated from high school in Northport in 1936. When Herb was 11 years old, his mother Emma was diagnosed with breast cancer and went back east for treatment for several months. Herb took care of the home and his father while Emma was gone.  Her cancer treatment was successful and Emma returned home to Northport cancer free. While in high school, Herb helped to build the impressive log gymnasium in Northport that burned down years later. Hubert and Emma owned a postcard camera that they used to document their life out in Black Canyon, and later in the Spirit Junction area where they moved when Herb was a young boy. The photographs chronicle a lifestyle that most of us have only imagined, giving us a stark glimpse at what life in rural Washington was really like in the early 20^th century. 

the first Speller logging truck

Herb and Mapel Speller near Spirit Junction

Hubert and Emma had a baby girl named Mapel when Herb was 16 and the family lived at Spirit Junction. Herb was a good brother to his baby sister in their life in the woods near Northport. Hubert and Herb continued to log around Spirit Junction and up Smackout Pass, and into the 1930s. In the mid 1920s, Hubert purchased his first log hauling truck, with solid rubber tires and the Spellers began to move ahead with the times.

Herb driving bus

  Herb left Northport in 1939 to work for a logging operation in St. Maries, Idaho, where he met Ida Helen Dodson, whom he married on Valentines Day of 1941. Answering a call for interstate bus drivers, Herb took a job for North Coast Lines out of Seattle, driving bus until 1946, with a brief interlude with the army in 1944. Drafted for the war effort, Herb was more than happy to go to Camp Roberts and begin his basic training, but he was shortly given a medical discharge for health problems and went back to driving bus. In 1946, Herb once again went back to logging, and eventually to heavy-haul truck driving in 1951. He worked for Consolidated Freightways and owned his own trucks into the 80s. In the early 50s, Herb built a house on Rowan Street in Spokane where he and his wife Ida and their children lived for 40 years. In the 70s and 80s made his way with his own log truck operation and grain hauling until he retired in 1984.

Herb at Camp Roberts, 1944

Hubert and Emma, along with Mapel, moved out to Flat Creek Road in the 40s after Herb left the Northport area, where they remained until Hubert’s passing. Mapel and her mother moved to Spokane where Mapel finished high school. Eventually, after moving all over the United States, Mapel found her way back to Colville where she lives now.

  In 1992, Herb and his sister Mapel, who was visiting from Alaska at the time, paid a visit to the old cabin site on Black Canyon. The cabin was gone when they arrived, but they came across a young man who lived on the property and had helped to tear the old homestead down. Herb tells the story like this:

the homestead at Black Canyon

  

“When we arrived in Northport, we decided to drive up to Black Canyon, about seven miles away. We had lived in this area from the time I was born through my early school years. There had been a large house where we had lived, plus some miscellaneous buildings. We drove up to a clearing near the old house, which was being dismantled. We alit from my pickup and were confronted by a boy on an off-road vehicle. We responded and told him that we wanted to see what changes by-gone years had made.

  In the conversation, he told us that he was salvaging some of the lumber from the old house to use in the home where he lived. In this procedure, a picture postcard fell out of a wall. He had never found out who the baby was in this picture.

  He asked us to stop at his house to look at the picture. When I looked at it, I said, “that’s me”. When I turned the picture over, it had my mother’s handwriting on it – ‘Herbert Sidney Speller – age 2 months’. I pulled my driver’s license out and showed it to him. This picture had been taken 72 years before.”

-       Herb Speller, Colville, Washington

  Herb’s connection to the history of the Northport area was strong. His time there was during the boom days: big Fourth of July celebrations, a growing timber and mining economy, and an influx of new families. Coming back more than seven decades later to find a piece of his own story left in the repurposed beams of his childhood home was a precious glimpse back to young and hardy parents and a wild country full of opportunity, adventure and possibility.  The photograph of that two-month-old baby represented 72 years of change, but a consistent devotion to family and hard work.

Herb's high school graduation photo, 1936, Northport, WA

  Herb moved back to Idaho after his wife Ida passed away, then returned briefly to Colville in 2004, and then finally moved to a retirement center in Spokane, in a room adjacent to the one that his mother Emma had lived in until she passed at the age of 95. Decades later, Herb passed away at the same age, on April 1, 2015. He left his legacy of hard work, perseverance and the value of family behind him in this world, along with a vivid capturing of life as it truly was more than half a century ago. Hubert and Emma’s photographs are a historical treasure for more than just the Speller family. They tell the story for all of us about what it took to get here.