KELLOGG
IDAHO- TRANSPORTATION DEPARTMENT
Shacks and Smelter Smoke Growing Up in Kellogg, Part Four BY JOHN VIVIAN
Part Four in a series of excerpts from the author’s reminiscences of his youth, which he assembled for friends and former classmates.
B
ehind our house on Railroad Avenue and across the alley was what we called Vets Housing. From what I was told way back when, the one-story frame structures had been slapped together at military bases as emergency housing during World War II. After the war, the Bunker Hill Mine acquired some of them as government surplus property. My guess is they came from Fairchild Air Base or Deer Park Air Field north of Spokane or maybe the Farragut Naval Station up at Lake Pend Oreille. They were trucked to 42 IDAHO magazine
Kellogg and plunked down on timber-frame foundations along the Lead Creek, from Hill Street almost to Division Street. There must have been twenty or twenty-five of them, each a lowrent multi-family rental, all in a khaki color that matched the continual dust from the unpaved roads that wound among them. No lawns, no yards, no fences. Dogs ran loose. My family moved from across the river to a sturdy house on Railroad Avenue in 1947, when I was two, so I never knew a time when the Vets Housing wasn’t there. To me they were part of the landscape. My only general impression as a kid was that people moved in and out a lot. Although the Vets Housing was just across the back fence, I didn’t have many playmates there. It may have
ABOVE: Postcard of the Silver Valley's narrow Burke Canyon. OPPOSITE: Smelter workers at Bunker HIll Mine.
