Pinedale’s Oldest Building Built Up Through Great Depression Generosity

PINEDALE — An invisible mortar has helped build and bolster the historic Chambers House Bed and Breakfast on the corner of Maybel and Magnolia in Pinedale.

That mortar is generosity, inspired by the Great Depression. It’s not something readily visible to weary travelers seeking a place to lay their heads.

But it’s there for the discerning spectators of history, collecting up all the threads of stories and legacies that make up the tapestry of a small Wyoming town.

Ann Chambers Noble is just such a spectator.

She’s the author of several history books about Pinedale and the surrounding area, and proprietor of the Chambers House Bed and Breakfast.

“You are sitting and having breakfast in the oldest building in Pinedale,” Noble told Cowboy State Daily as she poured this reporter a second cup of coffee to go with a freshly made ham and cheese omelet on a recent Friday morning. Gesturing at the dining room and kitchen, she added, “This is Pinedale’s old, one-room schoolhouse.”

That one-room schoolhouse started life in 1904, the same year Pinedale itself was founded.

Two local ranchers, Charles Petersen and Robert Graham, donated the property for Pinedale’s first plat. Petersen’s donation also included four of the town’s new lots for its first school, which once sat on the corner of Franklin Avenue and Mill Street.

A New Home Is Born

Pinedale rapidly outgrew its one-room schoolhouse, and it was abandoned in 1912 to make way for a larger school.

But that wasn’t the end of the line for the little one-room schoolhouse that generosity had helped build in Pinedale.

The school was moved to the corner of Maybel and Magnolia streets, which was then the edge of town, by L.H. Hennick. He added two rooms to the house and rented it out before eventually transferring it to his daughter, Angeline, and new son-in-law C.C. Feltner.

The Feltner’s little starter home was a true tiny house at first, but would grow a lot larger in 1933.

“This was during the Great Depression,” Noble said. “Everybody was out of work, there was no money to be had.”

So, because there was time, materials didn’t cost much and he had a growing family, Feltner decided to put an extension onto his home.

Put People To Work

But this was not going to be a small extension. It was going to be really a grand affair, because Feltner also had a little bit of an ulterior motive. He wanted to put as many people as possible to work during a time of great hardship.

So Feltner designed his new addition with a large living room and a spacious master bedroom with its own bathroom on the first floor. Then he designed a second floor with four good-sized bedrooms, including a stairway that led from the kitchen to one of the bedrooms.

Teams of horses hitched to sleighs were sent across a frozen Fremont Lake to Pine Creek Canyon during the cold, deep winter to log beautiful pine trees for Feltner’s grand extension.

“These were straight, beautiful trees,” Noble said. “And the locals felled them onto the snow. They chained them onto sleighs and, with teams of horses, brought those logs all the way from the head of Fremont Lake to this yard.”

Those logs, now nearly 100 years old, are still solid, wrapping all around the south end of the house — an invisible sign of the generosity that once helped build this special place. Only a few of the logs, which were at the very bottom, have been lost to time.

A Place That Feels Like Home

The Chambers House Bed and Breakfast came to Noble in a roundabout way.

“My grandfather came to Rock Springs in 1903, and he married the local schoolteacher and raised his five children there, the baby of which was my father,” she said.

Like many Wyoming families at the time, the children grew up quickly and scattered. Noble actually grew up in Salt Lake City, but spent her summers in Wyoming.

“I met a local rancher and fell in love and married him in the summer of ’88,” Noble said.

An aunt named Helen had come to her wedding in Pinedale, and it was she who discovered the home, sitting vacant on the corner of Maybel and Magnolia.

The aunt later told Noble that she had looked into the windows of this vacant house and something about it said “home” to her.

“By the time I got home from my honeymoon, (Aunt Helen) had already bought the house out of bankruptcy,” Noble said. “And she proceeded to renovate and did a beautiful job. Much of this house is still from her renovation, which came with the idea that the family would come back and stay with her — which they did.”

Noble and her husband were among family members who stayed at the home from time to time. It was particularly convenient when they came to town from their ranch in Cora, which is just outside of Pinedale in Sublette County.

Saving It Again

When Aunt Helen died, Noble and her husband decided they needed to find a way to keep the home in the family.

“It was actually my husband’s idea to open a bed and breakfast,” Noble said. “And so that’s what I did. I bought it out of the, it was in a trust, and I was the trustee.”

Here’s where another little act of generosity comes into play.

Noble wrote to all the people in the trust to say that she wanted to buy the home for its appraised value.

“Two of them objected to my price,” Noble said. “This was ’94, when things were pretty depressed around here. They said I should pay — a cousin and a brother — said I should pay 6% less than the appraised value because I’m saving the estate the Realtor fee. So, therefore I was overpaying. That’s how excited everyone was that I was trying to figure out a way to keep the house.”

Haunted By The Spirit Of Generosity

The Chambers House Bed and Breakfast is a charming overnight stay. And it doesn’t hurt the ambiance at all that a spirit of generosity seems to still haunt the place to this day.

The Noble’s family and friends frequently contribute antiques for the home’s decor — artwork for the walls, antique dishes for the buffet, period furniture, all of which helps to create a place where history and guests can settle in and feel comfortable.

Noble has made a few improvements over the years to the Chambers House Bed and Breakfast, where a portrait of her grandfather hangs over the fireplace with an approving smile.

She’s added new and comfortable beds for all of the rooms, as well as an extension to the back of the house, which serves as an extended stay unit for her family or for a caretaker in the summer.

One thing about the Chambers house hasn’t changed, though.

“The core of the house is still the same,” she told Cowboy State Daily.

And that is never changing as long as Noble owns it. She is, after all a historian, and keeping the home’s history intact is very important to her.

Small Hands Big Rocks

Among the charming stories Noble tells about the Chambers House Bed and Breakfast’s history is how, when she opened the bed and breakfast in 1995, some members of the Feltner family came to its grand opening.

“The cutest story that came out of that was from Elma, one of the daughters,” Noble said. “She walked into the master bedroom and looked down at the rocks that were in the fireplace and said, ‘Yeah, I picked that one and I picked that one.’”

The children had been sent by their father to Pine Creek with little metal buckets and instructions to choose rocks for the family fireplace.

“Those rocks are still there,” Noble said. “And there is definitely a unique one there. It’s black with little streaks of white.”

That’s the rock that Elma remembers choosing herself for the fireplace.

“She said, ‘I wanted dad to use that one, and he did,’” Noble said. “And it’s still there.”

The big rock chosen by a small hand is still there in a home that retains all its original windows and its handmade blacksmith handles, as well as all of those pine logs harvested during a time of desperation from Pine Creek Canyon because one man wanted to help his neighbors.

Of such stuff are great American towns and dreams made, and it’s how they remain through the example of Pinedale’s oldest building.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.