By Wesley Harris
For most buildings, determining the owner is fairly simple.
For one downtown Ruston building, the answer once depended on which floor you were standing on.
The Price Building stood at the northeast corner of Vienna Street and Park Avenue, about half a block from the railroad tracks. For more than 40 years, it was a busy part of downtown, housing merchants, doctors, dentists, attorneys, government offices and other businesses.
But the building had an unusual beginning.
The property originally belonged to Leroy Kidd. After his death, it passed to his widow, Arrilla, who later married Fred W. Price.
By 1910, the Prices were preparing to construct a two-story brick commercial building on the property. Before construction began, however, Arrilla Price entered into an unusual agreement with Ruston Lodge No. 1134 of the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
The Elks wanted a permanent meeting place. Rather than erect a separate lodge building, they would construct and own a third floor on top of the Price Building.
The 1910 agreement required the Elks’ floor to conform to the construction and appearance of the two stories below. The lodge paid Arrilla Price $573.64 for the additional walls, floor joists and other strengthening necessary for the lower portion of the building to support the extra story.
When completed, the arrangement was straightforward, even if the ownership was not.
Merchants occupied the first floor. Doctors, dentists and other professionals maintained offices on the second. The Elks owned the third.
Arrilla Price had also considered what might happen if the lodge eventually left. The agreement gave her the first opportunity to purchase the third floor at the price for which it might be offered if the Elks decided to sell. The agreement was recorded in Lincoln Parish’s conveyance records and made binding on the parties and their heirs and successors.
That provision would become important 20 years later.
Only months after the building was constructed, the Elks borrowed $3,500 from the Ruston Building & Loan Association, using their third floor as security. In 1927, the lodge borrowed another $1,500 under a similar arrangement.
Eventually, the Elks defaulted.
In December 1929, the building and loan association foreclosed, and the mortgaged property was advertised for a sheriff’s sale.
The property being sold was not the Price Building.
It was the third floor.
On Saturday morning, Jan. 25, 1930, bidders gathered for the unusual auction. The Price Estate, J. W. Thurmon, John P. Cruikett and the Town of Ruston competed for the property.
Before the bidding began, an attorney representing the Price heirs announced the family intended to exercise the purchase right contained in the 1910 agreement. He then had the sheriff read that portion of the agreement aloud to those attending the sale.
The Price heirs joined the bidding, offering nearly $2,100, enough to satisfy the foreclosure. But the Town of Ruston went higher.
The city bought the third floor for $3,100.
Two days later, the Ruston Daily Leader reported Mayor Crowell planned to put the floor to civic use, possibly renovating it as a recreational center with restrooms and other conveniences.
But the Price family was not finished.
As soon as the sheriff declared Ruston the successful bidder, the Price attorney tendered $3,100 to the mayor and demanded the property under the family’s purchase right.
The mayor refused. The attorney then tendered the money to the sheriff and demanded the deed. The sheriff refused, too.
Two days later, the sheriff deeded the third floor to the Town of Ruston. The Price heirs filed suit the following day.
The unusual dispute eventually reached the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Ruston argued, in part, that the purchase provision applied if the Elks desired to sell their floor. A forced sale through foreclosure, the town contended, was different.
The Supreme Court disagreed.
The court concluded that the intent of the 1910 agreement was to allow the Elks to own and occupy the third floor, not to give that privilege indefinitely to anyone who might later acquire it.
In February 1931, the Supreme Court affirmed the Price heirs’ right to purchase the third floor for the same $3,100 the town had paid at the sheriff’s sale.
The legal fight still was not over.
Ruston had possessed the third floor while the ownership case moved through the courts. After regaining the property, the Price heirs sought compensation for the time the town had controlled it.
That litigation provides an unusual glimpse inside the Price Building during the early 1930s. The first-floor commercial spaces produced $165 a month in rent, while the second-floor offices brought in $150. The third floor had been used for dances, banquets, parties, club meetings and other gatherings.
Witnesses disagreed about its rental value, but the court eventually settled on $100 a month.
The former Elks floor would continue to serve Ruston in other ways.
During World War II, the Price Building initially housed the local USO for servicemen before the organization moved to another location on Trenton Street.
The building also became home to government offices connected with the war effort.
In July 1942, the entire third floor was leased for offices of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Capt. E. R. Sims headed the Ruston office, where surveyors, architects and other personnel were working in connection with construction of the prisoner of war camp near Ruston.
The former Elks quarters contained five large rooms and two smaller offices. The space was repaired, repainted and redecorated, and plans called for installation of a private telephone exchange.
The camp represented a major wartime construction project. Plans called for about 190 buildings at an estimated cost of $2 million, with accommodations for as many as 4,000 prisoners of war.
A floor originally constructed as an Elks lodge — and later fought over by the Price heirs and the Town of Ruston — had become part of the federal government’s wartime operations.
After the war, the Price Building remained a busy downtown address.
One of its longest-serving tenants was dentist Dr. C. H. Laurence, who maintained his office there continuously from July 1, 1912.
Then, on Dec. 11, 1952, the Price Building’s story came to a fiery end.
The first alarm sounded at 5:15 that morning. Within five minutes, Ruston firefighters had water on the blaze, and three pumpers were at the scene within 10 minutes. Ten city firefighters, other city employees and a large group of volunteers battled the fire.
Fire Chief Jimmy Mabry believed the blaze developed on the second floor before spreading into the third and breaking through the roof. At its height, flames reached as high as 100 feet.
The Price Building could not be saved. Firefighters concentrated on preventing the flames from spreading to the surrounding downtown block.
Inside the building was a cross section of Ruston’s professional and commercial life.
Its occupants included engineer U. S. Roane, the U.S. Geological Survey, attorney Fred Jones, the Atlantic Refining Company, Dr. C. H. Laurence, Dr. Paul Davis, parish coroner Dr. J. J. Bennett, Boyette Music Company, Cecil Thurmon’s printing shop, Ruston Floor Covering Company and Garner Electric Company.
The U.S. Geological Survey alone estimated about $100,000 in work, maps and other records had been destroyed.
The Price Building was a total loss. Considering the value of the building plus the losses suffered by the businesses and offices inside, the total exceeded $200,000. That’s equivalent to $2.5 million today.
The fire damaged neighboring property as well. A falling wall struck an annex containing Patterson’s Barber Shop and Beauty Parlor. The nearby KRUS Radio Building suffered smoke and water damage, temporarily forcing the station to broadcast from its transmitter facility west of Ruston.
It was called the worst downtown fire Ruston had experienced in years.
Even while reporting the destruction, the local newspaper recalled one of the Price Building’s most unusual features — the arrangement under which the Elks had once owned the third floor while the Price family owned the building beneath them.
More than four decades had passed since Arrilla Price and the Ruston Elks entered into that agreement.
In the years between, the Price Building had housed merchants, doctors, dentists, attorneys, government offices, servicemen, engineers, dances, club meetings and wartime planners. It had been sold one floor at a time, fought over in court and become the subject of a Louisiana Supreme Court decision.
But perhaps nothing in its history was quite as unusual as the arrangement that started it all.
For 20 years, if someone asked who owned the Price Building, there wasn’t just one answer.
It depended on which floor they meant.
