May 15 2001

'We sort of feel like temporary visitors'

By Lerner Rugenstein

"When Irwin and Judith Krigsman bought the La Motte-Schutt house on Illahee Road eight years ago, they didn't know exactly what they were getting into. The house had seen hard times since Maj. Henry La Motte, a former Roughrider with Theodore Roosevelt, built it in 1901.

A decades-long procession of renters had painted the golden oak floors black, and the wooden ceiling beams were darkened with age. The dark wood of the four-foot-high wainscot in the living and dining rooms combined to give the interior a gloomy atmosphere. Holes were punched in the wainscot, and the wall sconces hung out of the walls by their wiring. It was hardly the kind of house a couple on the verge of retirement would look for. "People told us we were out of our minds to be doing this," Judy Krigsman said. They previously lived in Tacoma, where Irwin served for years and years as principal at Foss and Wilson high schools. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Terry Bergeson, a friend, asked him to come to Kitsap Peninsula, where she worked for the Central Kitsap School District. That's when they started looking for a fixer-upper, and found the Schutt house in 1991.

"I would drive out every day and work while Irwin was at school," said Judy, a retired social worker. Irwin retired in 1994, after working for the Central Kitsap and Bremerton school districts. Although the roofs of the back and front porches had fallen in, and the Krigsmans could only enter the house through a window beside the back porch, they saw its potential and welcomed the challenge of reviving it. Structurally, it was sound. "You had to see beneath the destruction of time and wear," Irwin said. The prospect from the big windows in the living and dining rooms - of the hillside sloping down to Illahee Creek, and Schutt Point beyond Illahee Road in the front - was incomparable. "But it took a year to make it livable," Irwin said.

"Judy did her share of plastering and carpentering," Irwin said. "She's very talented with a hammer and nails." She did a lot of the hard labor work restoring the house. She credited her father, the late Lt. Com. William James Phelps, who served on the USS Lexington when it survived the attack at Pearl Harbor, for her handywoman skills. The Krigsmans painted the wainscot and beamed ceilings of the living and dining rooms white, opening up and brightening the rooms. They also sanded the floors to uncover the original oak. Two chandeliers in the living room were original to the house. "We tried to keep everything that was original," said Judy. Electrically, everything had been pulled out. The kitchen is new, with golden oak cabinets and a wider door into the dining room and its corner fireplace.

The fireplace, and a similar one in the living room, was built with stones from Illahee Creek. The stairs to the second floor, while sound, were nothing to took at. So Judy put new golden oak risers and steps over them. "Eight months into the project, people were constantly pulling into the driveway, everybody who had ever lived here, to visit the house for old times' sake," Judy said. After they'd lived in the house about three years, one couple pulled up and asked if they could see the cabin, behind the house. "They said they spend five of the happiest years of their lives there when they were first married," said Judy. Another former tenant was a young man who asked to see his old bedroom on the second floor of the house. "He said his last fond memories were here, before his parents' marriage broke up," Judy said.

The cabin, with a new stone path and landscape to give it a quaintness against the background of the hill behind it, has its own story. It was built by a grateful patient of Dr. Ray Schutt, who owned it the longest. The patient was an Alaskan native, who returned to Alaska and floated the logs back to Washington to built the structure, said Irwin. The cabin was home to Schutt and his wife Joan for a while, after which their only son lived there, according to local history. Joan Schutt was said to dislike living in the house, so they stayed with their son in the cabin. They rented out the main house with the stipulation that all of their belongings be kept in their upstairs bedroom.

"There's a lot of history here. ... We sort of feel like temporary visitors in a house a lot of people lived in," said Irwin Krigsman. The Schutt house has had physicians in its history since it was built in 1901. The house was built by Maj. Henry La Motte, listed in a history book as the highest ranking medical officer in Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders, according to current owner Irwin Krigsman. The next owner of the house, Dr. Ray Schutt, was one of a pair of brothers who were physicians in East Bremerton and the Illahee area for many years, beginning in the early 1900s. Schutt's brother, John, founded Schutt Clinic in the area where both Drs. Schutt worked. John Schutt also started the area's first hospital, in about 1910, in a two-story residence on Burwell Street near Chester Avenue. John was also the first physician to buy an automobile - a Ford, in 1915, according to Kitsap County, A History, by the Kitsap County Historical Society. Before the advent of the internal combustion engine they hiked or boated to tend their patients and deliver babies. Many area residents told Krigsman that Ray Schutt traveled by boat to deliver their parents or themselves. In the Historical Society's account, Ray Schutt also dated his practice to the World War I era. In the Historical Society's tome, Ray Schutt is quoted as recalling one dark and foggy night returning by boat from Manette after delivering a baby: "Someone had drank (sic) the alcohol from the compass and we lost our direction and wound up alongside a battleship anchored in the bay," he said. "We also rented a team and a buckboard, and a one cylinder Cadillac from a Mr. Cain at Burwell Street and Pacific Avenue. Since it was one of the first automobiles in the area, we always had lots of company on our calls, as folks were anxious for a ride," he recalled. "It was a good thing, too, for we needed help to push up many of the hills. But with all those handicaps, it was surprising how many calls a doctor could make in those days." Ray Schutt, who was born in Canada, married Joan Marie Siler of Everett. The couple had one son, Ray Jr., who lived in a cabin behind the house until his death.

© Copyright 2007 Central Kitsap Reporter