As you drive into Middleton on the road that shares its name, a sign advises visitors: “Our citizens practice tolerance and welcome diversity.”

That sign used to state “Middleton, a good place to live,” and residents say that hasn’t changed. But the community felt the need to make its welcome more specific in 2003, after spray-painted swastikas cropped up on a park concession stand and a few residents reported they were accosted with racist epithets.

“It outraged the community of Middleton as a whole,” said Canyon County Commissioner Steve Rule, a lifelong Middleton resident and former City Council member. “And it stopped happening.”

“The people just kind of rallied around,” said Becky O’Meara, owner/editor of the monthly Middleton Gazette and great-granddaughter of the city’s first mayor, S.S. Foote.

OLD FLOUR MILL This is the only building remaining from the flour mill that was once a major employer in Middleton. Subdivisions have sprung up near the site on North Dewey Avenue a few blocks from City Hall.

Rallying is one of the things this community just west of Star and north of Caldwell is known for. People pulled together in February 2007, when an early-morning fire destroyed Middleton High School and hobbled the school district’s phone and computer systems. A few months later, another outpouring of neighborly concern and effort persuaded “Extreme Makeover” producers to choose Middleton’s Stockdale family as the recipients of a complete home renovation via the popular prime-time television show.

“When the going gets tough, everyone bands together,” said City Clerk Ellen Smith. “It’s a pretty neat feeling.”

Community feeling will be out in full force Saturday when Middleton celebrates the centennial of its 1910 incorporation with old-fashioned activities, food and fanfare.

The town itself started nearly 50 years earlier. Founded in 1863, it was named for its location midway between Boise and old Fort Boise near what is now Parma. Middleton is the oldest community in Canyon County and one of the oldest in the state.

Lee Moberly, a lifelong Middleton resident widely regarded as the town historian, said it seems a little odd to celebrate 100 years “when they’ve already had a hundred years and more.”

But Smith said this centennial is an occasion worth commemorating.

“It’s when we became a city,” she said. “The way I think of it, incorporation is what makes you official.”

DEATH, DIRT AND HISTORY

Like many cities, Middleton’s historical milestones were shaped by mayhem, such as the 1914 fire that destroyed the town’s two-story hotel and the 1926 bank robbery in which a bandit brandished two guns and made off with $1,800 that was never recovered.

Probably the most notorious incident took place on the south side of the Boise River about nine years before Middleton took root on the north side. In August 1854, local Indians attacked a wagon train traveling from Missouri on the Oregon Trail, killing 18 of the 20 emigrants. Known as the Ward Massacre, the battle is marked by a monument and small park just east of Middleton Road on Lincoln Road.

But one of Middleton’s biggest turning points came without Wild West drama, Moberly said: The Black Canyon irrigation project in 1948.

“All of that land north of town had been desert and sagebrush,” he said.

The Rule family was among those who benefited from the rerouted water.

“My dad plowed under sagebrush north of Middleton in the late ’40s,” Steve Rule recalled.

Historical buildings are scattered throughout Middleton, commemorated in a new self-guided tour brochure O’Meara and Moberly prepared for the centennial.

The city’s former jail and fire station sits on a ditchbank across North Dewey Avenue from City Hall, looking more like a storage shed than a public safety building.

Next door is the former Middleton State Bank, site of a 1926 robbery and now bedecked with cowboy and cowgirl silhouettes for its new life as the Our Place Saloon.

A TOWN IN TRANSITION

Horses graze in pasture two blocks from Middleton City Hall. Residents say their town has retained much of its rural feel even as its population mushroomed. The most recent official population estimate is 5,870, and local leaders expect this year’s census will tally about 6,000 Middleton residents – more than twice the count from the 2000 census and triple the population from 1990.

“It used to be you’d go downtown and you knew everybody,” said O’Meara, who remembers when the town’s population sign proclaimed 541 residents. “But so many new people have moved in, you kind of lose that knowing-your-neighbor feel.”

But she said Middleton still has “that home feeling. You feel safe and secure.”

Transportation has always been a key part of Middleton’s identity. While the Oregon Trail passed on the other side of the Boise River, an alternate route followed Middleton’s side of the stream. The Interurban streetcar ran from Middleton to Boise and Caldwell between 1907 and 1928. Now, Idaho 44 doubles as the city’s busy Main Street, connecting to Interstate 84 west of town.

“It still feels like a small town,” said Meridian School District Superintendent Rich Bauscher, who doubles as vice president of the Middleton Chamber of Commerce. “The downtown is small enough that you know all the businesses, and there’s not a lot of duplication.”

According to the 2000 census, the median income for a family in Middleton was $34,734, compared with a statewide average of $43,490 and a U.S. average of $50,046. But fewer – about 7.5 percent – of the town’s families lived below the poverty level, compared with 8.3 percent statewide and 9.2 percent nationwide.

The Middleton School District is the town’s biggest employer, officials said, with Ridley’s Family Market the biggest business employer.

Although Middleton has collected new businesses as well as subdivisions, most residents still head out each morning to jobs in Boise, Caldwell and Nampa. Easy commuter routes to Boise and Caldwell are among the city’s key attractions to homebuyers.

Shedding the bedroom-community label is “a dream of ours,” Smith said. “One of the city’s goals is to be able to sustain some beautiful business and industry and have more jobs for our citizens.”

‘A CLOSE-KNIT GROUP’

Although Middleton may not offer a wide range of job opportunities, its residents do far more than sleep there.

Community events, notably the big Fourth of July parade and Easter Egg hunt, draw big crowds, and residents gather for a wide range of fare.

“This is a real close-knit group of people,” Bauscher said.

This month the community is celebrating Middleton Unplugged, with each day featuring a community event – everything from an emergency preparedness fair to a mother/daughter makeover – or a suggested family activity. The suggestions include exploring your family tree, spring-cleaning the garage, and researching your favorite country and making a dinner reflecting that culture.

The brainchild of resident Fred Betzold, Middleton Unplugged is designed to make people more active, more interactive and less dependent on electronics.

“When you get home together as a family, that’s family time,” Betzold said. “We put our phones away, we turn our TV off and we turn our computers off.”

Unplugged made its debut last year and drew big crowds for the community events. Whether many people actually kept their televisions and computers off is an open question, O’Meara said.

“I know I didn’t,” she said. “But I sure did go to the community events.”

Betzold said he’s heard many families are meeting the Unplugged challenge, which should be easier this year because it was moved to April rather than March. Timing the no-TV event to coincide with the NCAA basketball playoffs was a point of frustration for some, he said.

The finals fell in April, and even Betzold admits he bent the Unplugged rules to catch that game.

But, he notes, “We watched it as a family.”

Kristin Rodine: 377-6447

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In preparation for the upcoming Smithsonian Journey Stories Exhibit, the Boundary County Historical Society will host an oral history workshop on March 24 by Kathy Hodges, Oral Historian with the Idaho State Historical Society.

The lives of ordinary people can contain romantic moments, frightening incidents, sad tales, breathtaking escapes, and sudden twists of fate. Are you thinking of interviewing your grandmother? Would you like to save community stories for future generations? Kathy Hodges will lead a discussion about memory, story, and history, and explain some of the basics of recording and preserving oral narratives, using examples from the 2500-plus interviews in the Idaho State Historical Society’s collection. The workshop will provide a full day of training for interviewers and community historians.

Everyone interested in gathering and recording oral history is invited to attend the workshop, March 24 from 9-4 at the Bopundary County Museum. Registration is limited. The workshop fee of $20 includes a text/workbook and lunch. Call Gini Woodward at 267-5638 for more information or pre-register at the museum. Hours are Fri. and Sat 10-4.

The workshop is funded in part by the Idaho Humanities Council, a nonprofit organization that serves the state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Idaho State Historical Society, and the Boundary County Historical Society.

Idaho’s Chinese gardeners filled a real need in the frontier communities where they settled. Many who had come to Idaho City and other Boise Basin towns as miners had turned to vegetable gardening because they could use skills they had learned growing up in south China’s Pearl River delta.

The Idaho World noted on May 13, 1869: “The excellently cultivated garden of a Chinaman, about two miles above town, is a scene to be observed along the road. In a patch not an acre in area the plodding, never-tiring, skillful John has made his garden, just at the roadside and sloping gently down to the shifting bank of the creek. Occasionally a sudden breaking of his water bulkhead will cause the stream either to totally wash away a portion of his little patch, or to ruin it by depositing thereon a depth of sand and slum which cannot be overcome.

“With manure packed in Chinese fashion by buckets slung from a shoulder bar, for a distance of half a mile, the industrious gardener has brought the ground to a high condition of culture, and from the small plat he yearly earns a sum which would be a fortune in itself to one of his own class in his native land. These Chinamen have certainly the art of raising a greater variety and amount of vegetables from a small plat of ground than our own people have yet learned to do.”

This praise and admiration for the Chinese was written by an educated and fair-minded editor, but there were many who were ignorant and prejudiced against them. Natural forces such as flood and drought were bad enough, but the patient and hard-working Chinese had to deal with thieves and vandals as well.

In Boise in the summer of 1870, the Idaho Tri-weekly Statesman reported that Chinese gardeners were delivering new potatoes door to door for 6 cents a pound. In July 1871 the paper noted that “John Chinaman makes his appearance bright and early every morning, with the traditional pole and baskets, the latter filled with every variety of fresh plucked and cool vegetables.”

What a convenience this was for the city’s housewives. The Olympia Washington Standard had a relevant comment in June 1879: “We are asserting only what everyone knows to be a fact, when we say that until the arrival of our Chinese gardeners, all our earliest small fruits and vegetable came by steamers from San Francisco, for which we paid exorbitant prices. Now, through the native tact and indomitable energy of Chinamen, these fruits and vegetables are raised from our own soil and brought to our doors weeks earlier than ever they were produced by white men.”

Boise’s riverside gardens made the pages of the Statesman often in 1890. In April: “The Chinese gardens between the city and the bridge look promising. Onions, lettuce, peas and other vegetables have been springing up until they have attained a fair growth.”

The high water that month threatened the loss of this promising crop, leading the Chinese to hire wagons and teams to haul dirt for building levees.

In December 1890 Mayor James A. Pinney told the city council that, “Chinese gardeners near the river are suffering many indignities at the hands of hoodlums and other roughs who break down their fences, and stone the Chinamen, and in other ways seek to injure these peaceable and well disposed individuals. They are entitled to the protection of the law and the officers should make efforts to arrest those who molest them. Some of the influential Chinese merchants have offered to give a reward of $25 for every conviction of persons seeking to harm these men or other Chinamen.”

Boise’s Chinese gardeners continued to be harassed by hoodlums, and in June 1892 the Statesman said that gunshots could be heard every night as the gardeners tried to scare away vegetable thieves. Even small boys were stealing watermelons, no doubt thinking it was a great adventure. Fortunately, nobody was killed or wounded. The only casualty mentioned in the Statesman was a neighbor’s cow, for which a Chinese farmer had to pay its owner.

Racial prejudice and damaging acts of nature were a continual challenge to Idaho’s pioneer Chinese gardeners, but they persevered.

Arthur Hart writes this column on Idaho history for the Idaho Statesman each Sunday. E-mail histnart@mindspring.com.

Last Monday night, at a meeting of the Garden City Council, Mayor John Evans read a proclamation honoring the Louie family. The Louies were Idaho pioneers who gardened in the area that became Garden City and gave it its name.

Andy Louie, representing the fourth generation of his family to raise vegetables there, accepted the proclamation on behalf of his family and graciously pointed out that other Chinese families also were part of the area’s garden history and should be remembered.

Mr. Louie’s wife, his son and two grandsons were present, representing the fifth and sixth generations of the family to live in Idaho. Other Chinese friends also attended the occasion, which included the public unveiling of a large, abstract collage honoring the Louie family and other Chinese gardeners from whom the town and Chinden Boulevard take their names. The work was commissioned by the Garden City Arts Commission after a month-long showing of this columnist’s collages in the Garden City library.

Louie Do Gee delivered fresh produce from his gardens along the river in what is now Garden City. Before he got this Model-T truck, he delivered his produce with a horse and wagon.

In April 1871, the Idaho Tri-weekly Statesman observed: “The China population are planting gardens here pretty extensively. They are so patient and puttering that they do well.”

The Chinese, who came to Idaho in the gold-rush days, had not been miners at home. They were peasant farmers from small villages in the fertile deltas of Guangdong Province in south China.

When mining or other employment ran out in their new country, they turned to what they knew best, and at which they were highly skilled.

Louie Ah Su, great- grandfather of Boise’s Andy Louie, illustrates well the pattern. He was a miner in Boise Basin in the late 19th century before he came to Boise and started a small garden in the city’s north end. By then the population of towns like Idaho City and Placerville had dwindled and most of the Chinese had left. When Ah Su went back to China, he sent his son Do Gee to take over the gardens in Boise.

Louie Do Gee leased land along the Boise River in what is now Garden City. His sons, William and Tong, came to Idaho from China in the early 1920s and successfully operated the Louie Gee Gardens until 1946, when the incorporation of Garden City forced them to give up the land they had leased from the Davis family, descendants of Tom and Julia Davis.

A 1920 history of Idaho describes the Davis property: “The Thomas J. Davis Estate embraces large realty interest, including about 700 acres of fine lands in the Boise Valley along the river just west of the city – lands that are most fertile and productive and which include the beautiful and famous Chinese gardens, visible to and admired by all travelers on the Nampa Interurban Railway line, which follows the crest of the hill above the gardens. These Chinese gardens are all on the Thomas J. Davis estate and constitute one of the most beautiful sights in the valley of Boise through the summer seasons.”

Do Gee returned to China a few years after the 1920 history was written and died there in 1942. Son Tong remained in Boise and operated the popular Shang Hai Low Restaurant on Capitol Boulevard until his death in 1951.

Son William and his son-in-law Philip Lee reopened the Louie Gee Gardens on 30 acres of land at Strawberry Glen. This business prospered, with all of the children working hard as they grew up.

William’s son Andy came to America from China for the first time in 1949. He was assisted in coming here by Margaret Cobb Ailshie, publisher of the Idaho Statesman, who had met him while on a tour of China. Andy joined the family garden operation in Boise. He joined the U.S. Army during the Korean War and was stationed in an Army hospital in Germany for two years. He would eventually earn a degree in pharmacy from Idaho State University and do graduate work in administration at the University of Colorado. He retired in 1997 from a position as administrator at Holy Rosary Hospital in Ontario, Ore.

Louie Gee Gardens closed in 1964 when Andy’s father, William, retired and Philip Lee went back to California, where he operated a successful supermarket.

Monday’s proclamation of Louis Family Recognition Day by Mayor Evans was an appropriate acknowledgement of the Chinese contribution to the Valley’s history. My personal tribute to the Louie family can be seen in the collage that now hangs in City Hall.

Arthur Hart writes this column on Idaho history for the Idaho Statesman each Sunday. E-mail histnart@mindspring.com.

Boise Valley Railway Car No. 100.

Boise began to grow and new subdivisions sprang up around town. Additional miles of track were laid to reach the newer parts of town. Then in 1905, construction began on two new lines designed to connect Boise, Nampa, Caldwell and the surrounding areas. The Boise Interurban Railway, which was the northern extension of this loop system, connected the towns of Eagle, Star and Middleton along the Boise River. Service to Caldwell began on August 16, 1907.

Read the full Story here  By Mark Moore

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