Enduring cabin shelters family branches' long ties

PRIEST LAKE, Idaho - Every year, the same thing happens.

The green hallway of trees along Idaho 57 bleeds burgundy, fire orange, mustard yellow. The ground turns cool and wet. People move and grow, things live and die.

And through the past 103 of those years, a stalwart cabin on Eight Mile Island has remained.

In its longevity, the cabin is as spectacular as the families it has tied together for 100 years: the Vinthers and the Nelsons.

About 130 distant and close relatives of Samuel Vinther and Nels Nelson gathered at this historic spot to celebrate the centennial.

"It makes me cry," said June Vinther Bech Linke, 89, Vinther's daughter. "I cried all day long."

The reunion looked like any other. Relatives gathered in groups, talking or gossiping. Some told the stories they've been spreading all their lives, of childhood accidents, adventures, loves.

Family dogs ran from group to group, panting, exhilarated at the unbelievable number of shoes to sniff. The kids were the same way, jolted with a boundless, unceasing energy of play. Cameras were the most important prop, save perhaps the cannon with which Jim Bech, a Vinther grandson, insisted upon blasting blanks at wooden boats.

Cameras have helped keep this stream of relationships together for many decades. At the gathering, photo albums lined a table on the porch of the cabin that's now a museum.

The caretaker, Stan Vinther, can't restrain himself from giving people the grand tour.

Long-held permit

"When the state of Idaho found out about this, they were excited. This is the oldest building on Priest Lake," he said.

The cabin was built in 1897, for use in mining the Deer Trail Lode. It was sold shortly afterward to a homesteader, who cleared much of the landscape to raise livestock.

Samuel Vinther and Nels Nelson, two cousins and partners in the hardware business, bought the cabin in 1900.

But because politics kept a mining claim from going through, Vinther and Nelson had to forgo their ownership for a special-use permit, granted by the U.S. Forest Service in 1909.

"It's kind of a semipublic, private place," Bech explained.

The next several decades, the Vinther and Nelson families spent summers on what would be renamed Eight Mile Island.

"We used to come here as kids," remembered Newt Vinther, 91, Samuel Vinther's son. "Folks took a train to Priest River, then a horse-driven stage to the halfway house (halfway between the river and the lake), then we'd chug up here in a steamboat and land on the point.

"Then we had to go back to Coolin. We rowed eight miles, to Coolin and back."

Old days on display

In 1980, there was talk of tearing down the cabin. So after considerable efforts, family members got the cabin registered as a national historic site.

Today, the hand-hewn fir and larch logs are stacked stiff in defiance. The antique wood-burning stove informs its users they can cook food from warm to hot to very hot.

Old product cans, unearthed from the yard, let visitors see history. There's a bottle of mange medicine, complete with precipitated sulfur. Another bottle, of Old Taylor Whiskey made by the American Medicinal Spirits Co., has a prescription label on the side: "One-half ounce every four hours," Bech reads of the Prohibition relic.

"This was 1932, during the Depression," he chuckled. "You have depression, so you buy a depressant."

A washboard sits in the sink, for laundry. A chair is nearby, held together by wires.

Outside is a makeshift church, complete with an arch made of branches and pews and a pulpit of 2-by-4s. A rickety outhouse. A nine-hole putt-putt course. A shed, all preserved for so long.

And walking through it all, a family preserved for just as long.

"My father would bring up both families," remembered Jeanne Vinther Danzer, 80. "Then he'd go home; Uncle Nels would come take over for the rest of the summer.

"My favorite thing as a child was to steal the rowboat and go out in the roughest water I could."

In Danzer's eyes, a glint of sadness shimmered as she realized there won't be many more reunions for her. "This means the last trip I'll make here," she said.

But the next generation promises to carry on.

"We'd spend the bulk of a summer up here as children," said Jim Bech, Vinther's grandson. "It was just a handful of people. Now there's 150."