COLFAX – The rural seat of Whitman County, often overshadowed by its college-town neighbor Pullman, has big ideas for its historic downtown.
Business owners are mustering creative efforts to revive a row of Main Street buildings to give travelers on Highway 195 more reasons to stop and take a break. One idea is to open more places to eat and drink.
Colfax Downtown Association’s business incubator project remodeled a former bank that opened as a restaurant last month. Wild Ember Kitchen at 102 N. Main is a New American eatery and bar with a streetside patio and a private dining room inside the old vault.
When owner and chef Trevor Miller was growing up on a farm just outside of town, he remembers there were never many food options.
“What’s the point?” he said. “Just drive 20 minutes to Pullman.”
But things have changed in the 14 years since he graduated high school.
Trained at a culinary school in Portland, Miller worked his way up from a line cook to an executive chef at various restaurants across the West. He moved back to town recently to raise his family, with the intention of starting a food truck.
That’s when he learned about the business incubator. Whitney Bond, the downtown association’s director, encouraged him to apply to use the space. He was skeptical.
“I kept telling them no, I don’t want any part of it,” Miller said. “It’s Colfax, it’s going to be hard to open a restaurant here.”
Besides a few fast-food joints, a Chinese and a Mexican restaurant, there isn’t a high-end, sit-down American restaurant.
The Hyde Out Bar and Grill closed a couple of years ago. New owners have a sign on the door, “We’re working hard on renovations.”
Miller has watched restaurants open and close on Main Street, never lasting long.
“To see it now, certain things have changed,” Miller said. “I think everyone is trying to get out of the cities now. Small towns are more sought after, not to live in, but to just go to on the weekends.”
He realized it would be silly to turn the incubator down. With the downtown association handling the remodel, supplying furniture and kitchen equipment and subsidizing rent, the overhead was incredibly low.
“I’m not going to get handed an opportunity like this again,” Miller understood. “Not without having to put up a million myself.”
At first, Miller was thinking he would just use the bank’s old drive-thru to serve breakfast food. But when the other applicant dropped out, Miller agreed to take over the entire space.
Now he’s focused on lunch and dinner, with plans to add breakfast in the future. To start, it’s mostly burgers and loaded fries, but Miller wants to elevate that to a rotating menu of steaks from local beef, pastas and seasonal salads.
To him, “New American” means flexibility to do anything. Think comfort food with twists from international flavors.
Wild Ember isn’t the incubator’s first business. A $2.2 million small business innovation grant from Washington State Department of Commerce allowed the downtown association to purchase and renovate two buildings for the project.
Business incubators are becoming more popular, Bond said. They are often shared spaces that can lower startup costs. The goal is to cultivate new businesses so that they can become self-sufficient and eventually move out on their own to free up the space for a new business to start.
The incubator’s other location a block away from Wild Ember at 203 N. Main opened a year ago and houses a natural skincare shop and a wine bar.
Kylie Pietela started the Coco Bee Candle Co. as an online business selling handmade beeswax products. Its brick-and-mortar retail space at the incubator includes a back room that is available for events or candle and soapmaking workshops.
Around the corner of the same building is The Cellar, a wine bar that started in an art gallery a few doors down. Now that owner Kimberly DeHart has more seating space, she has quadrupled her revenue, she said.
“I like wine,” DeHart said. “I didn’t know if Colfax would like wine, but here we are.”
The incubator keeps things simple and affordable, and allows her to focus on building the business. Upstairs, DeHart is building an exclusive area for wine club members.
DeHart helped found the downtown association in the mid ’00s as an alternative to the chamber of commerce more focused on aesthetics, tax benefits and minor building grants. She had an idea for a business incubator back then, but funding wasn’t available.
Growing business downtown is a collaboration, she said, not a competition.
When The Cellar and Coco Bee are both open, so are the French doors that divide them. Customers can pick up a glass of wine and wander next door to shop.
DeHart sends folks to Wild Ember for dinner. When Miller first got to town, he worked for DeHart, making pairings for The Cellar. She was happy to see him start his own thing.
“Trevor and I will never be in competition,” DeHart said. “I’m a wine bar, he’s a restaurant. Big difference.”
As Wild Ember attracts new visitors to town, many of them will end up in The Cellar someday, and vice-versa.
“The more successful he is, the more successful I’ll be,” DeHart said.
The Colfax Downtown Association occupies an office above The Cellar and Coco Bee. The building has additional space on the third floor they plan to renovate and rent for offices.
Besides the incubator, the association provides façade grants to help businesses modernize their storefronts. Bond said it has created a domino effect. When more owners update their storefronts, it incentivizes others to do so.
Bond said the incubator not only helps start new businesses, it helps retain existing businesses. Both Coco Bee and The Cellar were thinking of moving out of town.
Despite numerous empty storefronts, a shortage of available business housing limits where they can go. Since many of the buildings are historic, it can be expensive to bring them up to code.
An assemblage of agriculture offices, banks, insurance agents and other services that wouldn’t attract the casual visitor occupies the remaining commercial spaces on Main.
As part of the major route from Spokane to Pullman, about 10,000 vehicles pass through town a day, according to Washington State Department of Transportation data.
In the five years she has worked for the downtown association, Bond said a perception has shifted among locals that Colfax has always been this way, so it always will.
“People are coming around to the fact that it doesn’t always have to be like it was for half a century,” Bond said. “We don’t have to be a rural community who barely makes it or isn’t able to achieve big things.”
Some said the incubator wouldn’t succeed. But with more public-facing shops open, foot traffic is growing. With more places to eat and drink, the hope is that folks will stick around longer and stroll the sidewalks.
Named for Ulysses S. Grant’s first vice president, Colfax started as a sawmill and was the first non-Indigenous settlement in Whitman County, founded more than 150 years ago. Farms grew around it, and a railroad was built.
Stones above most of the historic structures label the years they were built during the heyday from the late 1800s through the 1920s
Unlike other towns that boom and bust, Colfax’s population has remained remarkably steady.
In 2020, it had 2,782 people – exactly the same as in 1930, and only two more than in 1980, according to the U.S. Census. The population peaked at 3,057 in 1950.
Valoree Gregory, director of the Whitman County Historical Society, said the town was restrained from expanding too much because it is nestled in a gorge formed at a confluence of two forks of the Palouse River.
The population hasn’t dropped either, perhaps partly because it is the county seat and remains a popular bedroom community for Pullman. Many Washington State University faculty live in Colfax for cheaper housing and a quieter environment, Gregory said.
Although people still lived there, business ebbed over the years and storefronts boarded up – until almost a decade ago.
In 2015, St. Ignatius Hospital was listed among Washington’s most endangered places by the state historical society.
Opened in 1894, the hospital later became an assisted care facility until it was abandoned in the early 2000s. The imposing Victorian building gave off spooky vibes up a hill at the south edge of town.
To call attention to the deteriorating landmark, Gregory started giving ghost tours.
The tours became wildly popular, making more money than expected and luring thousands of ghost-hunting tourists to town. The chamber of commerce reinvested a portion of the proceeds into downtown revitalization grants, which made a big difference in turning things around for businesses, Gregory said.
In 2021, Austin and Laura Storm, a couple from Moscow, Idaho, bought the building and continued Gregory’s tours in partnership with the historical society. They reinvest the money into preserving the building.
A new roof has been built, and they are just finishing a roof on the adjacent kitchen, but there’s still a long way to go.
“St. Ignatius saved us,” Gregory said. “Now, we need to save St. Ignatius.”
Preservation is up the Storms’ alley. The owners of the Storm Cellar, a popular used clothing store in Moscow, moved into an 1800s farmhouse in Colfax and opened Bully for You, a three-story vintage furniture and clothes store. That theme is fitting, because it occupies the historic Fair clothing and department store, which later housed various furniture outlets before it was boarded up.
Colfax Mercantile, a shop in the same building block, was a prototype for the business incubator. The downtown association partnered with the Storms to remodel the property for local artisans and small vendors to share one retail space.
Gregory is one of the members who sells retro candy and baby clothes. The proprietors each take turns minding the store, so they only have to work a few hours a week.
The shared-cost model worked so well, they decided to stay together.
Still, a few storefronts remain empty.
Eight years ago, Texas resident Kim Nguyen saw a handful of downtown properties for sale online. She fell in love and bought six of them, sight unseen.
“I go with my feeling,” Nguyen said.
She opened a wedding dress alteration business in one of the storefronts and leases another to a home goods store. She has a grand vision for restoring the rest, which includes an old cinema and Masonic temple. But she still lives part-time in Rockport, Texas, where hurricanes damaged her home and delayed her efforts.
As an outsider, Nguyen said she faced tension with some of the locals, skeptical or impatient with her plans.
So, she has taken a step back. She is still working, but quietly on her own.
She hesitates to lease out more of the storefronts, she said, because she worries about preserving the historic character of the buildings and has a hard time trusting tenants after some bad experiences.
Nguyen proudly offers tours of the buildings.
The Rose Theater, built in 1912, was originally a dry goods store that was remodeled in 1920 by Spokane architect Gustav Albin Pehrson with a Spanish mission-style stucco facade.
The theater sat 300 people. Among them was a young Robert Osborne, film historian and host of Turner Classic Movies, who worked there as a teenager in the 1940s.
The theater moved when wide -screen films became more popular, because the narrow building couldn’t accommodate the format. A ceiling was laid over the first floor, which became a hardware store for a number of years.
Today, only work lights illuminate the second floor’s dilapidated balcony, art deco chandeliers and roses painted on walls. Nguyen wants to make it a museum.
A bigger landmark is a hefty three-story building at the center of town known as the Fraternity Block that once housed the Freemasons, Odd Fellows and Knights of Pythias.
The hall on the second floor remains furnished as the Masons left it, with upholstered chairs neatly lining the perimeter.
A yellow banner displayed at the front shows a writhing dragon framed by wheat stalks. Below, it says, “Colfax Awake.”
A Buddhist monk from Texas painted it for Nguyen when he visited. In Vietnamese culture, Nguyen explained, a dragon sleeping beneath the ground is difficult to wake up. When it does, it moves the earth with prosperity.
“What I feel is the land of Colfax is still quiet,” Nguyen said. “So, I’m thinking the dragon isn’t awake yet. But when it awakes, it will shake the land.”
While various new enterprises are starting, one old business is trying to come back.
A fire destroyed Fonks Coffeehouse, next door to Wild Ember, in March 2020.
Owners Amy and Joel Warwick rebuilt in the same location, preserving part of the original brick shell that survived the fire. They hope to reopen in the next couple of months.
“I didn’t want to see this turned into a parking lot, because we had so many people that were attached to this,” Joel Warwick said.
A five-and-dime store by the same name occupied the site for many decades.
At the time of the fire, the second floor housed merchandise for Warwick’s online sports apparel company, Team Stores. He still runs the store out of a different building.
It has been a long road to rebuild. For six months after the fire, Joel Warwick said he couldn’t drive down Main Street because he couldn’t bear to look at the wreckage.
“The flames were 40 to 50 feet above the building,” Joel Warwick said. “This was just a gigantic chimney.”
The new building is smaller, covering about half the footprint and only one story. The bricks above were unsecure and had to be taken down.
The front is painted freshly white with large windows. A mural on the side that miraculously survived the flames was another reason to preserve the building. Former Colfax art teacher Henry Stinson painted the retro sci-fi homage to the American Gothic portrait with a couple of robot farmers.
Inside, scorch marks clearly show where the brick was exposed.
“We want it new, but still want it to feel the way it did,” Amy Warwick said.
The cafe will be like it was before, with breakfast and lunch menus. Once open again, they would like to try staying open late a few nights a week to serve adult beverages.
Behind the restaurant, the leftover brick shell encloses a spacious courtyard that will have outdoor seating by a fireplace and a tree.
“Our town, we’re making it a destination,” Amy Warwick said. “A place where people driving through want to stop.”
For many years, Joel Warwick’s father, Steve Warwick, owned a chain of athleticwear stores that included a branch in downtown Spokane. Joel has taken over the business and keeps a Sport Town attached to a fitness center up the street, in addition to the online business.
Joel Warwick said more stores were open when has growing up in the ’80s and ’90s before the internet destroyed them. Now, owners are trying to find unique niches to reopen.
“We offer more of an experience,” Joel Warwick said.