The Staley family saves everything - literally everything.
They don't just belong to the pack rat's club, they're charter members. And because the family has lived south of Pullman since before Pullman even existed, they've had plenty of time to perfect their art and collect anything and everything under the sun.Luckily, however, that collection has been fashioned into a family museum by Staley great-granddaughter Molly Staley Benscoter and her husband, Jack.
The museum is in the family's original house built in 1889, two years after the family arrived in Washington after traveling west from North Carolina. And the house, like the rest of the Staley belongings, is in great condition after being lovingly restored by the Benscoters.
Of course, that was after they had the building loaded and moved two miles across the wheat fields to give it a better location and protection from vandals, but the house survived the trip without a scratch. "It was great, not one window even cracked," Jack Benscoter said of the 21/2-hour haul.
And while the renovations took two years of hard work, they were made considerably easier by the Staley family's habit of never throwing anything away.
"Most of it was still here, even the original door hinges. It just needed to be cleaned up or restored," Jack Benscoter said. "Just about everything is original, even the staircase banister - we only had to replace a small part of it."
Jack Benscoter handled most of the carpentry in the house, while Molly Benscoter focused on rounding up and sorting through all the stuff the family has saved - and she had a lot to go through.
Most families try to save old photographs and keepsakes, and there are plenty of those, but that wasn't enough for the generations of Staleys. They also managed to squirrel away everything from old doors and windows with original hardware, to a complete 12-place setting set of French china without even one chip or crack in it.
"Everything was just piled up in the back rooms of the old family house or in family trunks," Molly Benscoter said while on a tour of the museum. "I don't think they ever threw anything out. And since they came here in 1887 and didn't move around, they had a lot of stuff saved up."
The Benscoter family members, while not up to Staley level, aren't slouches in the pack rat category either. One of the upstairs bedrooms in the house has been christened the Benscoter room and is filled with memorabilia. Another room combines old farm tools and memorabilia from both families' ranches and has everything from an anvil carried over the Oregon Trail to a cider press the Benscoters, now in their 60s, said they still were using shortly after their marriage.
The bedrooms have antique beds and furniture, almost all Staley family originals, and two of the rooms also boast mannequins with wedding dresses from Molly Benscoter's grandmother to the dress she wore to marry Jack.
The upstairs library is jammed with old books and papers, including original Whitman County plats, that show what the town of Staley looked like before it faded out of existence in the 1920s. Photographs galore are in the room along with old diaries, writings and even the ledger from the Staley Mercantile, which has every purchase recorded by hand.
Downstairs, the parlor, sitting room and dining room are Victorian delights, with period furniture from the Staley family, family keepsakes scattered and reproductions of period wallpaper on the wall. The parlor also has portraits of the first couple devoted to the house, Daniel and Catherine Staley, Molly's great-grandparents, who built the house in 1887. A mannequin displays the dress that Catherine Staley is wearing in the portrait, though its size indicates it was probably cut down for another Staley member along the way, Molly Benscoter said.
"At first we just wanted a place to collect all the treasures for our family and the younger generations, but then we decided to share it with others," Molly Benscoter said.
The museum, two miles south of Pullman, had already had its share of visitors when it officially opened Oct. 21. The guest book had recorded more than 500 people who just stopped by to see how the home was coming.
"And it's so much fun showing it off that we always just stop and show them around," Molly Benscoter said.
The museum is open every Friday from 1 to 4 p.m.