Depot Museum invites you to a reading of “A Child's-Eye View”

WALLACE ­— The public is warmly invited to a reading of selections from the memoir, A Child’s-Eye View and related discussion by Mr. Ron Roizen -- in the Women’s Waiting Room at the Northern Pacific Railroad Depot Museum at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, September 27th, 2017.

Mary White was born in Wallace on April 8th, 1898, the daughter of Henry and Maude White. The White family made their home in the handsome edifice at the northeast corner of Cedar and Third Streets. Father Henry, a businessman and banker, was an early pioneer to the Coeur d’Alene Mining District. He’d moved his business pursuits from Murray to Wallace in 1888 -- where, soon thereafter, in 1890, he and partner Charles Bender built the White & Bender building in downtown Wallace, which remains one of the jewels of Wallace’s historic architecture to this day. Maude Fox White, Mary’s mother, was cousins with Grace Campbell, the wife of noted mine owner and investor Amasa “Mace” Campbell; Grace and Amasa lived cattycorner to the White family on the southwest corner of Cedar and Third.

Mary and her younger brother Jack knew the close-knit community of Wallace at a time when it was a thriving, bustling, and lively mining town. In 1977, now in her 79th year, Mary White Gordon (her married name) penned a charming, affectionate, and absorbing memoir about her childhood days here in the first decade of the 20th century. The existence of a typescript of this memoir has long been known to scholars and local historians – Heather Branstetter’s recent book, for instance, cited it. Yet, it was only in 2016-2017, some four decades the memoir’s creation, that local history buff Ron Roizen made contact with Mary’s descendants and together they jointly published A Child’s-Eye View.

Refreshments will be provided and copies of Mary White Gordon’s memoir will be available for purchase.

For more information about this event please call the NPR Depot Museum at 208.752.0111.