Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
Curtains shining with real gold. A bear-hide coat. Necklaces made from real human hair. An ice-box from pre-1910 fitted to house a modern refrigerator.
An 1892 mansion on a hill outside Oakesdale has been slowly furnished for the past 20 years with pre-1910 Victorian era items.
Now big, glittering glass chandeliers, pre-1910 silver-plaited tea kettles, silk ladies night caps, massive wooden cabinets, bed frames and thousands more antiques pack each room of the home.
Terri Gravelle and Paul Matthews have made a lifestyle of searching out and restoring rare Victorian items and lining their home with them since 1989.
“It’s kind of our sickness and passion all in one,” said Gravelle.
Known in the Oakesdale region as “the Castle,” the brick mansion with the turret was built by an Oakesdale homesteader, Edwin H. Hanford, in 1892.
Gravelle said the couple fostered a burgeoning obsession for the Victorian era which had them hauling in antiques from all over the Northwest and beyond.
With no children and no expensive cars or vacations, Gravelle said they were free to purchase the items they wanted, relying on their bargain hunting skills to seal better deals.
Matthews, Gravelle’s husband, has worked full-time at Schweitzer Engineering since the early 1990s.
Gravelle, now retired, worked as a P.E. teacher at the elementary school in Airway Heights for many years, making the almost 100-mile round trip from Oakesdale to the West Plains every day.
Part of their goal of turning their entire mansion to the Victorian era included taking modern appliances and fitting them out with pre-1910 exteriors.
So their full-size refrigerator was hand-crafted inside a late 1800s ice box by a refrigerating company in Spokane.
Their “butler pantry” is finished in pristine, shined fir wood panels, where they stash their microwave, food and other kitchen supplies.
Their electric oven was adapted from an iron wood stove of the time period. Under the heavy black metal flaps of the aged stove surface lie modern burners and the modern switches to turn them off and on.
Four fireplaces, with the original wood and marble inlay, adorn the home. The couple has tracked down multiple coal furnaces and placed them throughout the house.
For their real heating needs, they purchased an oil furnace, which is operated electronically and fueled from a 1,000 gallon tank full of oil. Between that furnace and a Blaze King operating in the basement during the winter, they stay warm, Gravelle said.
On the first floor, the mansion holds the kitchen, pantry, a massive dining room, a music room and an extra entertainment room.
Two staircases, one for main traffic and one for the servants, lead to the second and third floors.
The second floor holds two servants’ rooms and five more bedrooms. Each room is elaborately finished in curtains, carpet, era beds, antiques on the Victorian dressers, kerosene chandeliers and kerosene bed lamps poking from the walls.
“We love doing it but a lot of people think we’re crazy,” said Gravelle with a laugh.
The attic leads to the interior of the turret, the signature of the castle as it towers over the wheat hills outside Oakesdale.
Perhaps the most rare, the basement of the Hanford mansion runs the lengths of the home. With 10 windows to the outside, an indoor garden and indoor fountain lie within.
The Hanford castle and the Hanford family has a long history in the town of Oakesdale. Located about a mile outside town at the end of a very long dirt road, the mansion was built by Hanford in 1892.
Rosemary Henrickson, 86, is the granddaughter of Edwin Hanford.
Henrickson has lived in Oakesdale for many years and spent 10 years living in the Castle between 1948 and 1958 with her husband, the late Stanley Henrickson.
In an interview with the Gazette June 28, Henrickson said her grandfather, Edwin Hanford, moved to Oakesdale with his wife from Chicago in the late 1800s. In Chicago, he had made a tidy sum in the fishing industry with his brother.
When he and his family moved to Oakesdale, he worked as a banker in the town until 1912.
He had the construction of the house started in 1892, commissioning the help of the same Spokane architects who designed Our Lady of Lourdes Cathedral and the Gonzaga University Administration Building.
Henrickson also set about planting an orchard that eventually covered almost 200 acres and featured 60 varieties of apple trees.
She still can recall family stories of relatives working and caring for the family orchard.
“It was just bunchgrass soil then, you see,” she said. “It was fertile. It was ready to produce.”
She recalls how her father John Hanford would get tears in his eyes remembering the long family years working the orchard. The apples and pears were shipped out by rail.
She said she remembers her father waxing poetic about glimpsing Haley’s Comet over the Palouse in 1901 or 1902, out the west window of his bedroom.
The mansion was traded out of the Hanford family in 1912. In 1916, Martin Henrickson Sr. bought the home. The son of that couple was Stanley Henrickson. Rosemary Hanford married Henrickson in 1946, a union that once again tied her closely to the house.
“I didn’t marry him to get the house back,” she said with a laugh.
She said she is one of six living grandchildren of the original Hanford couple.
Many descendants of the Hanfords still live in Oakesdale, Henrickson said. She noted, with a laugh, that 13 of her great-grandchildren live in and around Oakesdale.
Gravelle said she and Paul occasionally call Rosemary for advice on how to continue refurbishing. They have traveled the country visiting other Victorian mansions for clues on the best trends that mimic that time period. Most towns have some type of Victorian-era home, she said.
Both Gravelle and Matthews are from the west side of Washington and met “over volleyball,” Gravelle said.
They lived in a small 1920 bungalow in Spokane for 10 years before moving to Oakesdale. They spent time redecorating that home to fit the 1920s. It was their first venture into period decorating, Gravelle said.
She has always had a deep liking for the Victorian era and when Paul casually mentioned seeing a Victorian castle for sale, the two looked into it.
“I didn’t think we could ever afford or find something like that,” she said.
The tiny ad Paul found had a small photo of one of the Hanford turrets. They made some phone calls and the rest is history.
When asked who was more into decorating the home, Gravelle said they were both equally obsessed.
Paul is more into Victorian lighting, she said. Indeed, most of the rooms have shining glass chandeliers fueled by kerosene, along with three-foot-high floor lamps topped with Victorian globes.
“I do more with the fabrics, colors and drapes,” she said. She has sewn together several sets of curtains and done the beadwork for some of the decorations and dozens of other antiques that needed repair once they bought them.
On a wall in the basement hangs an “aviary’, a glass box lined with about a dozen preserved songbirds. She found this relic at an antique store in Uniontown. Most of the birds are more than a hundred years at this point.
Gravelle said they have spent thousands of hours working on the home. Much of her summers off from teaching were spent repairing items and decorating the home.
The day before the June 28 interview with the Gazette, she was working on refurbishing their porch when she took a wrong step and fell five feet through a hole in the porch. Scrapes and bruises lined her arms and legs.
“I work a lot on the house,” she said.
The home is listed on the National Historic Register.
The couple opened the home to be a Bed and Breakfast about 12 years ago for four years. The business did well by word of mouth but as they both work full-time, they found they didn’t have the time.
Today, Gravelle said they are mostly finished collecting and have set their sights on finishing up painting bedrooms and finishing the porch and basement.
“On a house like this, you never stop working,” she said.
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