o What: Holiday Home Tour
o Where: Downtown Camas
o When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday
o Cost: $20
o Information: www.downtowncamas.com/events-and-festivals/holiday-home-tour
CAMAS — Mike Hughes remembers driving around the east side of downtown Camas as a kid and gazing out the windows at the Farrell House, an opulent Greek Revival home filled with local history.
“We definitely knew about the house,” Hughes said with a wide smile stretching across his face. “I mean, it’s a landmark for the city.”
Decades later, Hughes owns the place, and he gets a kick out of peering out into the streets at drivers stopping to marvel at his new home. The Hughes family moved in last year, and this weekend they’re opening their doors for paid tours of the historic house decked out for the holiday season as part of the Downtown Camas Association’s Holiday Home Tour.
The tour, now in its fifth year, showcases four homes, including a 98-year-old bungalow near Crown Park and two modern houses in Lookout Ridge and Lacamas Shores, the last of which was built in 1993 and was featured in the Street of Dreams. Each home will be open to ticket holders from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sunday.
Guides from Soroptimist International of Camas-Washougal will be on site at the two older homes to share stories about their pasts. The event is geared toward promoting the history of the city and supporting businesses in downtown Camas, said Carrie Shulstad, executive director of the Downtown Camas Association.
“It’s a neat way to show the culture of Camas, because we do have the old and the new,” Shulstad said. “We focus on our heritage, and so it’s important for us to showcase historic homes. We (also) encourage people to come into downtown and do lunch, do shopping.”
There’s a bit of debate about when the nearly 5,000-square-foot Farrell House was built, but county records date it to 1913. The place is named for its original owners, Charles and Rose Farrell, two pioneers of Camas’ business community, who moved to the area around the turn of the 20th century. He was the city’s first registered voter; she became Camas’ first businesswoman.
The two met working downtown in the early days of Camas’ paper mill, and Charles Farrell eventually became a city councilor, a position he retained for many years. In 1903, the couple purchased a general store in the heart of downtown Camas at Fourth Avenue.
Known over the years as The Fashionette and the Farrell and Eddy Department Store, today the store is listed in the National Register of Historic Places for its significant role in the development of downtown Camas. And since 1983, the Farrell House has been listed in the Clark County Heritage Register.
The Hugheses purchased the house on Ione Street last year from Heidi Curley, who originally intended to use the place as an event space for weddings and small parties before the city rejected her plan in 2011. Prior to that, the Farrell family had always owned the home.
“You don’t hear of a home that stays with a single family in this part of the United States for long,” Hughes said. “It was almost 100 years that it stayed with the family.”
Since moving in, the Hughes family has been busy giving the place a new, or rather old, look. Over the past several months, they’ve decorated the house with antiques and worked to restore and preserve many of the original features of the home.
The family recently remodeled the kitchen — Curley had converted it into a commercial kitchen. They added new cabinets, made to match the original ones, around the kitchen table, and laid down new oak hardwood floors.
“We’re pretty sure it had oak hardwood floors originally,” Hughes said. “We wanted to really put something back in that was more traditional of the home. We tried to get it close but still have all the modern conveniences.”
Tickets for the tour are $20 apiece, and they are available at the Downtown Camas Association’s website, www.downtowncamas.com/events-and-festivals/holiday-home-tour. They will also be sold at the Camas Hotel beginning Friday and throughout the weekend. Addresses and directions to the four homes will be given only to ticket holders.
