| Dick
Southern to be guest speaker
Historian Dick Southern will be speaking to the Kamiah Valley Historical Society on Sunday, April 7 at 2:00 pm at the Kamiah Welcome Center in Kamiah. Mr. Southern will speak on his book, “They Called This Canyon Home”, about the Bethman Mansion and the Pardee area in which the Bethman family settled years ago. Copies of the book will be available for purchase at this event. Southern is retired from his chosen profession of farming and cattle, and lives with a big yellow dog Junior, and youngest son Ryan in a house built in 1898 on a ranch between Craigmont and Winchester. An active member of the Ilo-Vollmer Historical Society in Craigmont, Southern was recognized in 2011 with the Idaho State Historical Society’s Esto Perpetua Award for outstanding contributions to individual, local, and regional historic preservation. He has traveled to area schools realistically portraying Colonel William Craig, Craig’s settlement among the Nez Perce at Lapwai, and a prominent figure in the 1861 founding of Lewiston, as Idaho’s first Territorial Capital. Southern is also a recognized authority of Victorian Era Flow Blue china of which he was a co-founder of the Flow Blue International Collectors Club in 1986. He has compiled three books on the Flow Blue wares produced by the Wheeling Pottery Company of Wheeling, West Virginia that closed in 1908. Currently Southern is researching and compiling a local histories of the Gifford, Idaho area, where he grew up. This will include the early pioneers of the Gifford Plateau which embraces Summit, Rosetta, Lookout, and Melrose. He hopes to have the publications ready to release by August of this year. The public is invited to this free event in Kamiah at the Welcome Center on Sunday, April 7 at 2:00. Come and join us for refreshments and an entertaining afternoon with Dick Southern. |
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