Nominate your favorite Ada ‘treasures’
Look closely. Just above the signature on your Idaho driver’s license, you’ll see a faint image of an old-style barn surrounded by rolling hills. That barn, a real place and part of a working farm on Blacks Creek Road west of Boise, is also in the running to become one of Ada County’s six “County Treasures” for 2008.If you have favorite historic sites in Ada County, particularly in unincorporated areas of the county, there’s still time to submit your nominations to the county’s Historic Preservation Council. Nominations are due by Monday. The council, made up of volunteers appointed by the county commissioners, includes experts in archaeology and preservation. Each year since 2003, the group has named six “treasures” - sites significant to Ada County’s rural past, or to the history of county government or even to the county’s physical infrastructure. The list in the past has included structures like the New York Canal’s Callopy Gates near Kuna. Council member and history fan Al Bolin said the gates, named after a worker on the Oregon Shortline Railroad that used to run nearby, haven’t been used in decades. Once, they protected the area from floods by diverting water into Indian Creek for natural drainage. Leslie Toombs, a planner in the county’s development services department, said that so far this year, submissions are sparse. Sometimes, to compile its list of six sites, council members refer to a county survey taken in the late 1990s, when architectural historians traveled through the entire county, street-by-street, acre-by-acre, to identify important structures. “The idea was to document what is there because the county is changing so quickly,” Toombs said. “Sometimes we go out now to see the structures listed on the survey but find they’ve been torn down, or altered, and have lost their historic features.” Being designated a “county treasure” carries no legal weight when it comes to protecting historic buildings. “The county has no means of objecting to changes, or destruction,” Bolin said. “But the program recognizes surviving structures’ historic significance and the people who have been responsible for preserving them.” The winning properties share a special metal sign during the year and get immortalized on the county’s Web site. Bolin’s own favorite “treasures” were among last year’s winners - four structures that make up the once thriving village of Ustick around Ustick Road and Mumbarto Avenue: The former mercantile, bank, car repair/sugar beet processing plant and school building. The old Ustick School on Mumbarto Avenue, now apartments, still has its original coal furnace in the basement. “With Ustick, we were able to do kind of a theme,” Bolin said. “And given that Ustick Road is being widened to four lanes (between Cole and Five Mile roads, just west of the old Ustick townsite), this seemed like a good time to bring attention to the historic parts of the area.” Anna Webb: 377-6431
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