WASHTUCNA — In a tiny town in the southeastern corner of Adams County, some folks are trying their best to save a piece of history, and turning to the Washington Trust for Historical Preservation for help.

“The (Bassett Hardware) Building is 125 years old,” said Michelle Plumb, treasurer/secretary of the Washtucna Heritage Museum and Community Center. “I don’t know how many things in this area are that old. It would just break my heart to (lose) that building.”

The Bassett Hardware Building, located in downtown Washtucna, is one of the oldest structures in the little town of about 200 and possibly in Adams County. Built by the town’s founder George W. Bassett, it’s stood in the same place since 1901, through boom and bust, storm and sunshine, a reminder of the town’s frontier past. The lower part started life as a hardware store, then became a grocery store in the 1940s and ’50s, Plumb said.

The upper part of the building was always some sort of community space, she said. The Modern Woodmen, the Oddfellows, the Rebekahs and the Masons all used it as a lodge hall over the decades.  During the 1970s, the building finally fell vacant. The building was sold to a private owner in the 1980s, and was finally donated to the Washtucna Heritage Museum and Community Center in 2018. Somewhere along the line, part of the roof blew away off in a high wind.

The upstairs also had served as a theater for movies and plays in the 1910s and ’20s, Plumb said. That was when the gable in the front 20 feet or so of the building was taken apart and replaced with a square structure with room to raise and lower a theater curtain. That construction was no match for a 2025 windstorm that caved in the rest of the roof and collapsed the false front.

The rest of the building, however, was very sturdy, Plumb said. Volunteers came into the building in 2021 and 2022 to clean out the pigeon droppings and assess the building’s condition.

“We had an engineer look at it in 2022, and he said the whole building is kind of leaning in the direction the winds come from, which you would expect after it turns 125 this year,” she said. “But the first floor is still pretty stable-looking. It doesn’t seem to have any problems other than falling plaster from being open to the elements.”

The organization would like to use the bottom part as an exhibit space for artifacts from Ice Age floods, and maybe a business incubator with Wi-Fi access and space to give presentations. The upstairs would make a great community space, Plumb said. But to do that, it needs a lot of work. Which is where the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation comes in.

The Bassett Building was added last year to the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation’s list of Most Endangered Places, said Preservation Programs Director Moira Nadal.

“The Most Endangered Places list isn’t just buildings,” Nadal said. “It could be buildings, places, structures. The idea is, we’re trying to amplify a concern from a community (as) an organization. People will come to us and say ‘Hey, there’s this really important thing in our community that a lot of us care about, and we’re worried about it for XYZ reason, and we’re looking for help.”

That help could be as simple as having people show up at a city council meeting, Nadal said, or it could be fundraising to make repairs. The Trust doesn’t run fundraisers itself, Nadal said, but it can help with getting the word out for the people who do.

“We can reshare social (media) posts,” she said. “We can include information in our newsletters and e-blasts and we can try to leverage connections with other organizations or local entities.”

The trust has had a hand in saving some artifacts, like the train bridge across the Columbia River at Beverly, which has been integrated into the Palouse-to-Cascades trail, or the iconic Teapot Dome gas station in Zillah. Inclusion on the Most Endangered List isn’t a guarantee, however; some of the places listed have been irrevocably lost.

“Unfortunately, that’s a real part of preservation,” Nadal said. “Historically, preservation … has been reactive. You lose something big like Penn Station in Manhattan (torn down despite public outcry in the 1960s) and people begin to (say), ‘Wait a minute.’”

The buildings that get onto the Most Endangered Places list may not look like much, but they’re part of a community’s history and often of its heart. Especially in a town like Washtucna, where the population has decreased and most of the businesses that were there 50 years ago are gone.

“You see a real ebb and flow of the movement of population, but when you lose those sort of community spaces, it’s hard to attract people to move or visit or linger in your town,” Nadal said. “But if there were a cool community center or a museum ... that might do something. For a community of that size to reach out to us and be fighting so hard for a building, there’s definitely heart there.”

    When volunteers from the Washtucna Heritage Museum and Community Center tackled the job of cleaning up the Bassett Hardware Building, they found that most of it was fairly sturdy, except for an area at the top right that had been damaged by wind.
  

    Downtown Washtucna in 1910, with the Bassett Hardware Building visible at the top right.
  

    A windstorm in February 2025 collapsed the front of the Bassett Building, frustrating efforts to preserve it.