Saturday, January 28, 2012

99-year-old house in Kuna comes down to make way for new AutoZone store


A demolition crew tore down a 99-year-old house on Thursday at the northeast corner of Orchard Avenue and East Avalon Street on the 1.3-acre parcel of land where an AutoZone store is being built. ESI Construction is building the 7,147-square-foot AutoZone building, which received approval from the Kuna Design Review Committee in November. Expected completion date of the store is April, according to ESI Construction. AutoZone has three stores in Boise, one store in Meridian, as well as stores in Nampa, Caldwell, Emmett and Homedale. AutoZone joins NAPA Auto Parts, which operates a store at 279 W. Main St. downtown. All AutoZone stores are owned by the company — there are no franchises.

3 comments:

slfisher said...

Wow, I never knew that house was that old. It looked pretty nondescript. I'm not sure that anyone's ever lived in it in the time that I've been here. How'd you find out it was 99 years old and do you know anything more about it? It might have been one of the oldest houses left in Kuna.

Scott McIntosh said...

Ada county assessor records show it was built in 1913, and Jim Russell also told me it was actually six months shy of turning 100.

slfisher said...

Oh, yes, I looked it up too. I guess I was just wondering how you came to know, or whether just for the heck of it you'd looked it up and found out or what.

If you looked up the assessor's records, then you saw it was part of the Avalon Tract, after which we get the name Avalon Road (not to mention Orchard). After the town of Kuna was platted, what we now think of as downtown, in 1909 and 1911 several multiple hundred acre parcels were added on at that part with the intention of growing fruit. Hundreds of acres of apples, and people figured they'd strike it rich.

I'm not sure whether it was the heat/dryness, or simply oversupply, but the trees just couldn't make a going concern and they were eventually all taken down. You'd never know now, would you?

If that house was built in 1913, it must have been one of the earliest houses on the orchard tracts. I don't remember running into it in the records, but I'll look them over.