The old Washington Federal building at 102 North Main is quiet again. For sixteen months it held Wild Ember Kitchen, a Korean BBQ and burger operation from Colfax native Trevor Miller and Amanda Packer that opened as the first tenant in the Colfax Downtown Association's brand-new restaurant incubator. It closed on December 31, 2025. If you drove past recently and thought Main Street felt thinner than it did in September, you were reading the block correctly.
Here is the part that gets missed on the drive-by. The vacancy is the model working, not the model failing. And the next several weekends in Colfax are actually easier to plan than they were a year ago, because the town's real anchors, the ones that were here before Wild Ember and will be here after the next tenant signs, are all mid-season right now.
Why the empty window at 102 North Main is not what it looks like
The Colfax Downtown Association bought the old bank and spent most of a $2.26 million Washington State Department of Commerce grant renovating the 3,521 square foot single-story building into a subsidized incubator kitchen. Miller and Packer won the space through a competitive process and leased it at below-market rent, which is the whole point of an incubator: get a first-time operator into a fully built-out room they could never afford to build themselves, and see if the concept can carry a Main Street lease later.
Wild Ember did not make it to the graduation step. In a Facebook post in November, the owners said they had exhausted their options and thanked the Downtown Association and their customers. The Whitman County Gazette covered the announcement, and the Pullman Radio write-up made the important distinction plainly: the first run of the incubator did not work, but the building, the equipment, and the subsidized-rent structure are still there for tenant number two.
A shuttered restaurant on Main Street reads as decline. An empty incubator seat reads as an opening. Same window, two stories.
For residents, the practical read is this. Do not build your dinner plans around 102 North Main for the next few months. Do build them around the operators who were already here when Wild Ember arrived, because that is where the incubator's flagship chef actually started. Miller was doing food out of The Cellar Wine and Beer Bar before the Downtown Association recruited him. The Cellar is still open, still pouring, and still the room where the next incubator tenant is arguably being auditioned right now.
Two weekends, planned
The fair is coming. Everything else on your calendar between now and then is a warm-up. Here is how to use the shoulder days.
This weekend, if you want to stay in town:
- Saturday morning coffee at Fonk's Coffee House (one of my favorite places in the whole world!), then a slow lap of Main Street to find the "crack art," the tiny paintings scattered on buildings by artists sponsored by the Colfax Arts Council. The Chamber has the walking-tour map if you want to make it a project with kids.
- Saturday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., the Perkins House Museum is open for volunteer-led tours. The 1886 Victorian was built by James A. Perkins, one of the two settlers who platted the original townsite in 1871, and the log cabin behind it is the oldest building in Whitman County. Tours are free. Ring the bell inside the front door.
- Saturday night, dinner at The Cellar or Eddy's Chinese and American, then walk the four blocks to the Codger Pole on South Main. The 65-foot chainsaw sculpture by Jonathan LaBenne holds the carved faces of fifty local players from the 1988 rematch of a 1938 high school football game. It reads differently at dusk than it does from a car window.
The weekend after, if you want a longer plan:
- Book a St. Ignatius Hospital tour with Laura and Austin Storm, who bought the vacant 1894 red-brick hospital in 2021 and now run history-and-paranormal tours out of it while they work on longer-term restoration. The building has been empty as a medical facility since 1968 and vacant entirely since 2003. Whether or not you believe in the ghost angle, the architecture and the interior condition are the actual draw.
- Sunday, drive the loop out to Steptoe Butte for the late-afternoon light on the wheat, then come back through town for a walk past the two lesser-known sculptures that most residents have stopped noticing: the carved car and driver on Main and the walking man on Mill.
Neither weekend requires you to leave the 99111 zip code. Both give an out-of-town guest more than they will get from a Pullman gameday trip.
The fair is the anchor, not the ornament
The 77th Palouse Empire Fair runs four days in mid-September at the fairgrounds five miles west of town on State Route 26. The regional coverage puts it at more than 23,000 visitors over the run, which is roughly eight times the population of Colfax proper, packed into a Thursday-through-Sunday window. If you live here, this is the weekend your street parking, your grocery run, and your route to Pullman all shift.
The programming is what it has been: PRCA rodeo Thursday and Friday nights at seven, a local rodeo Saturday including the horses-versus-horsepower matchup that has become the sleeper draw of the week, carnival rides opening at three on Thursday and at eleven the other three days, the pie eating contest, cow chip bingo Sunday afternoon. Daily admission has been running $15 for adults, $10 for seniors 55 and up, $5 for youth, and free for kids under five, though tickets are worth double-checking on the fair's site before you go.
The interpretation for residents is not the schedule. It is the timing. The fair sits right at the harvest overlap, when the combines are still working the fields you can see from the fairgrounds parking lot, and it is the one weekend of the year when the agricultural identity of Whitman County stops being background and becomes the foreground event. If you have kids in 4-H or FFA, you already know. If you do not, this is the year to walk the livestock barns anyway.
What to hand out-of-town guests
Colfax's problem with visitors is not that there is nothing to do. It is that the things to do are quiet, and quiet reads as empty to people who mistake noise for activity. A short list, in the order that tends to convert skeptics:
- Perkins House first, because the interior wallpaper alone rewrites the "small farm town" story most guests arrive with.
- Codger Pole second, because the backstory is better than the object and the object is already good.
- St. Ignatius third, only if your guest has an appetite for a two-hour tour and does not mind stairs.
- A stop at the Whitman County Library and the attached Libey Gallery at the Bettie Steiger Enrichment Center. The library is the de facto community center; the gallery rotates resident artists.
The Perkins House Ice Cream Social on the last Sunday in June is the summer version of this same tour, with vintage fashion and pie added. If your guests are here in September instead, the fair does the same social work.
One item to put on the calendar now
Watch the Colfax Downtown Association's announcements for the next incubator tenant at 102 North Main. The building, the hood, and the subsidized lease are still in place, and the whole reason the Association pursued the Commerce grant in 2022 was to run this play more than once. The next operator will benefit from what Miller learned about a Main Street dinner crowd in a town of roughly 2,800 people, and the room will re-open with better information than it had in August 2024. When it does, that becomes the Saturday night reservation to make.
Until then, the calendar Colfax already has is stronger than the one most residents give it credit for. Weekends here are not thin. They are unadvertised.
If you are weighing a move within Whitman County, thinking about listing a Colfax home before the fair weekend brings buyers through town, or simply want a read on what the next twelve months look like for values along Main Street and the residential blocks off Mill and Perkins, I would be glad to talk. Krista Gross works across Pullman and the broader Palouse with Realogics Sotheby's International Realty, and every conversation starts the same way. Request a personalized home valuation and let's begin there.
