Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
On Tuesday, July 30, a woman stood on the corner of Crosby and Henkle Street in Tekoa looking up at a building. In her hands was a brown-tinged 8x10-inch picture on top of a stack of more pictures.
“I was just looking for my great grandpa’s hardware store,” said Janet Shelton of Richland, Wash.
A man walked by and noticed what she was doing.
Roy Schulz, who is a Tekoa city councilman, confirmed for her that it was the same building in her picture.
“I live in the Henkle House,” he added.
“The what?” Shelton asked.
John Wesley Henkle was her great-grandfather, the owner of the former Henkle Hardware store in Tekoa and the man who built the house that Roy and Kim Schulz live in now.
Roy, who was in downtown Tekoa during a weekday on a rare occasion to buy hardware for his job across the state line, told her about the house. Shelton then showed him another picture, this one of her great-grandfather standing on the porch of his home with two little girls sitting on the railing.
“That’s my house,” said Schulz to Shelton’s surprise. “We’ve got that same picture on our wall.”
She thought the house had long been torn down. And how did they have that same picture on their wall?
All the while there was something Schulz didn’t know – who the two little girls were.
Shelton told him one of them was her grandmother.
Schulz then gave her directions to the house.
“Knock on the door, my wife’ll want to talk to you,” he said.
The Schulzes had gotten the picture copied from a creased photograph someone had sent to city hall in 2007 from Portland, Ore.
When Shelton knocked on the door of the Henkle House a few minutes after meeting Roy on the street, Kim Schulz answered.
Shelton explained who she was and why she was standing on her porch.
“Come on in,” Kim said.
Filling in
the puzzle
Shelton showed Schulz the picture of the man, the house and the two young girls.
Schulz quickly brought Shelton over to her living room wall, where the refurbished copy of the same image hung.
Shelton, 60, pointed out the 6-year-old blonde girl as her grandmother, Irene.
Further information followed and Schulz took Shelton to a stairway to the basement under which the name, “J.W. Henkle, Tekoa” was handwritten in ink on an exposed board.
They surmised that it must have been the top plank of a bundle which came from the hardware store.
“It looks like the handwriting on my grandmother’s report cards,” Shelton said.
Later, Shelton and Schulz sat down and went through her stack of 40 black and white pictures.
In it was an array of Tekoa history from the 1890s to 1912-13. There was presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant on a platform in 1896, the 1908 Tekoa High School football team and a fourth-grade class with names hand written on the back. There were also pictures of the former high school and the former grade school, a pre-Slippery Gulch Days “Harvest Festival” and a series of images of the downtown streets, from horses and buggies to a Model T Ford seen on Crosby Street.
There were also individual portraits, including one of J.W. at age 15 in 1892. On the back it reads, “Demorest, Extra-Finish, Garfield, Washington.”
Other portraits showed the insignia of “L.A. Lemon, Farmington.”
“My family took pictures,” Shelton said. “They were getting their pictures taken right and left.”
As for the picture of the house, believed to be built in 1908, Shelton indicated the place was easy to spot.
“Everything’s the same,” she said.
Kim Schulz has known the house her whole life, as her grandparents lived in it from the 1960s to the 1990s, the fourth owners. They are not related to the Henkles.
Shelton had inherited her stack of pictures from her grandmother Irene and great-grandmother, Eva Edna, including the one of the old Henkle House, which she had seen her whole life, knowing it as once standing in a place called Tekoa.
“I grew up looking at these pictures,” she said.
Shelton also heard the stories, about the hardware store and J.W.’s brother Thomas, “Uncle Tommy’s,” mortuary in the basement.
“They would tell stories of my grandmother running around the bodies at Uncle Tommy’s mortuary,” Shelton said.
All the while, as Shelton’s pictures and anecdotes provided information, they also brought up new questions.
For example, in the shot of William Jennings Bryant campaigning for president in 1896, there is a wooden hotel in the background. In a picture the Tekoa Museum already has, taken at the same spot as a photo of Teddy Roosevelt in 1903, it shows a brick hotel.
The brick one is known in Tekoa history, but the wooden one is a mystery at this point, said Harry Brandt, president of the Tekoa Museum and Historical Society.
“Nobody in town knows anything about it that I’ve talked to,” he said.
Overall, Brandt said he appreciates the pictures.
“They’re pretty awesome,” he said, indicating that the pictures also revealed additions to the hardware building which weren’t previously known.
Found in an attic in Portland
Of Janet Shelton’s inherited pictures, the family had some duplicates, unknown to her.
It turned out that the duplicates were left in an attic in Shelton’s grandparents’ house in Portland, Ore. It is the house which J.W. and Eva Edna Henkle lived in at the end of their lives.
When Shelton’s grandmother died in 1993, the surviving family prepared the house to be sold.
More than 10 years later, a couple who owned the house at the time called the Tekoa City Hall saying they found a bunch of pictures in the attic with the words “Tekoa, Washington” on them.
They sent the box to city hall.
At the time, Carol Sturman, Roy Schulz’s aunt, was on the Tekoa City Council. She saw the pictures and gave the Schulzes the damaged duplicate of it to have a copy made.
Ever since, the photo hung in the Schulz’s house with no information beyond the outline of J.W. Henkle’s life in Tekoa.
So when Shelton showed up this summer, it was a day of revelation for her and the Schulzes.
“It was like stepping back a century,” said Shelton.
When she drove from the Tri-Cities that Tuesday, she wanted to give the stack of pictures to the museum.
Before coming to Tekoa, she learned that the library adjacent to the museum was open on Tuesday.
“I went there hoping to find someone at the library to give the pictures to and the whole day opened up. It was amazing,” she said.
J.W. Henkle died in 1960 in Portland.
“Tekoa has just been in the family vocabulary forever,” Shelton said, indicating that the only other time she has ever heard the name is in the Bible.
(A town south of Bethlehem, its namesake is mentioned in Corinthians 2:24 in the Old Testament: “And after that Hezron was dead. Abiah, Hezron’s wife bore him Asher, the father of Tekoa.”)
Shelton’s mother was born in Clarkston.
She now lives in a retirement community in California with Shelton’s father.
All told, Shelton said she is glad to have the trove of family pictures.
“I became the hand-me-down historian of my generation,” she said.
J.W. Henkle’s parents were first-generation pioneers who settled in Philomath, Ore.
“All the pieces to the puzzle have been found, thanks to meeting Janet,” said Kim Schulz.
“I didn’t even know my puzzle was so empty.”
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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