In a time before women had the right to vote, Carrie Harris was financially independent and a successful businesswoman.

Developed by Carrie Harris, the Hotel Aberdeen is a corner-lot brick building that captures the stories of working-class Spokanites who came to Spokane at the turn of the 20th century to work in growing regional industries such as mining, lumber, and railroad. The three-story structure was built in 1898 as single room occupancy housing (SRO) in Spokane’s East Downtown Historic District, an area characterized by warehouses and commercial buildings with working-class affordable living accommodations on the upper floors and businesses catering to those residents on the ground floor.

The Hotel Aberdeen was home to working class Spokanites, but it was also an investment property for Carrie Harris, a female property developer who was active in the first decade of the 20th century. After divorcing her husband in 1900, Carrie Harris, now thirty-seven years old, quickly put her money to work. She moved to Los Angeles, California with her daughter where she had a stately home built for herself. She then began developing single family homes near the University of Southern California. 

Simultaneously to her real estate ventures in Los Angeles, Carrie Harris was accumulating and developing property in Spokane. In 1903 she developed the high-end seven-story Hotel Victoria in
Downtown Spokane’s central business district. The Hotel Victoria, demolished in 1979, was a stunning Second Empire influenced hotel with a mansard roof and second floor balcony wrapped with wrought-iron railings above the sidewalk. In 1906, Harris fiananced another high profile development, the Westminster Aparments which are still extant in Browne's Addition.

When Nelson Durham’s History of the City of Spokane and Spokane Country Washington was published in 1912, just one year after Carrie Harris died, he explained that her real estate investments made her “one of the wealthiest woman in Spokane.” He continues his praise saying that she was “the brightest businesswoman in Spokane” and “one of the most beloved women of the city.”

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Captain Leonard White piloted the first steamboat to cross the 49th parallel bringing miners and supplies to the goldfields of British Columbia.

The population of the Upper Columbia Country exploded when gold was discovered along the banks of the Columbia River and its tributaries in the early 1850s. The first gold boom, the Colville Gold Strike, drew prospective miners from all over the country, swelling the population of the region with the influx over 1000 miners to Fort Colville by 1855. Unfortunately for the miners, the production of the mines was short-lived and every couple years the miners were forced to head further north toward the goldfields of British Columbia.

In order to help the eager gold-seekers reach the new mining locations, Captain Leonard White built a 219-ton sternwheeler steamship to transport miners and supplies upriver. White was a pioneering river navigator considered to be one of the most accomplished "swift-water steamboatman" in the Pacific Northwest. He piloted steamships on the Sacramento River, Willamette River, Snake River, and Lower Columbia River before arriving in the Upper Columbia. On November 18, 1865, with 75 passengers on board, White’s steamship Forty-Nine departed from Marcus, Washington on its first trip north.

On her inaugural journey, Captain White and the 114 foot long, 20 foot wide Forty-Nine traveled further north than any previous steamship, making it all the way to the Narrows of the Arrow Lakes near present day Nakusp, British Columbia. The Forty-Nine was forced to drop its passengers and turn around before its planned destination due to the growing winter ice. The steamship made multiple journeys the following year, some further north than Revelstoke, British Columbia, but by 1868 gold production had slowed and miners began to leave the area. Demand for transportation on the Forty-Nine dwindled, forcing Captain White to park his steamship while he and his crew worked the gold mines themselves.

Nonetheless, the steamship, with White at the helm, continued to operate on a less frequent basis when demand was sufficient. In 1869, Captain White stepped down and First Mate A. F. Pingston took over. Soon after, the new captain ran the Forty-Nine aground just south of Downie Creek, British Columbia. The steamship was pulled from the water and continued its work as a transport vessel until 1879 when the mechanical components were salvaged and the hull was left to rot and rust away near the Marcus townsite. Much like gold fever in the Upper Columbia, the Forty-Nine had a short life.

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How is an international border drawn and who does the drawing?

The United States-Canadian border in the Pacific Northwest is clearly marked and border agents at defined crossing points regulate movement from one side to the other. This system is the direct result of the hard work done by the United States and British Boundary Commissions. In the late 1850s hundreds of men descended on the rural and mountainous region to do the hard work of drawing the international border—and for much of that time, especially during the winter months, they used Marcus and surrounding areas as their base camp.

Both countries had their own commission, assigned to work independently of one another on the same goal of building base stations, cutting trails, and erecting monuments to identify the location of the 49th parallel. The men cleared brush, built bridges, collected specimens, surveyed topography, and packed supplies. Their teams were made up of astronomers, surveyors, naturalists, topographers, surgeons, laborers, teamsters, veterinarians, engineers, quartermasters, interpreters, and geologists. The teams worked in small groups and the work was slow. For example, it would take a month for a team of as many as eighteen men to clear just thirty-five miles of trail.

After crossing the Cascade Mountain Range, the United States Boundary Commission made a base camp at the military base Fort Colville, located near the present day city of Colville, Washington. The British Boundary Commission built their base camp in present day Marcus, Washington just north of the Hudson Bay Company’s Fort Colvile, located on Marcus flats. These base camps were heavily inhabited during the winter months when the boundary work was halted due to harsh weather conditions. Each spring, after the snow thawed, the crews would depart, return to where they left off the previous season, and continue drawing the line eastward.

The work was completed in 1862 when the crews reached the Continental Divide. Over the 409.5 mile boundary, twenty-eight base stations had been built and 161 monuments were erected. Even though the two commissions had worked independently, their work was surprisingly consistent. Their jobs finished, most of the men departed the area for other opportunities but the international boundary will always serve as reminder of the work of the International Boundary Commission.

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Beneath the pine needles that cover this historic cemetery lie generations of native and fur trade families.

Missionaries conducted their final service at St. Paul’s Mission on August 14, 1875. Without the stewardship of the clergymen and parishioners the building quickly fell into disrepair. But although the church was no longer in use, locals continued to bury their dead in the mission's cemetery.

Records for this cemetery are incomplete, but the earliest burials probably occurred soon after the mission was built in the 1840s. Proper funeral rites were an important part of the Catholic mission, including burial in consecrated ground. For their part, the Indians were suffering increased mortality in the 1800s as white settlers brought new diseases to the area. There are dozens of known burials here, and perhaps many more, but only a handful of grave markers remain.

One small cross memorializes the 1892 death of Thomas McDonald, the five year old grandson of Angus McDonald. The McDonalds were representative of the culturally diverse families that arose during the fur trade era, when white traders (Scottish, English, and French) often married Indian women. Angus was a Scottish fur trader with the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Colvile. He married Catherine Baptiste, the daughter of a Nez Perce chief. Angus and Catherine had many children together including a daughter, Christina, who said two of her brothers were buried at this cemetery. It seems that the McDonalds continued to use this as the burial location for their family until the turn of the 20th century.

Newspaper obituaries record additional burials here, including an Indian named Charles Hope and two European immigrants. There may also be a number of graves at this cemetery that were relocated from the Mary Barnard cemetery in Ferry County to avoid the rising waters of Lake Roosevelt.

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In 1915 tuberculosis struck the Spokane Indians hard. Four natives died and fifty more were suspected of having the disease. In response to the outbreak, the Indian Service used the site of the former boarding school to create a sanitarium for local Indians suffering from tuberculosis.

Sanitariums were not just found on Indian reservations. Tuberculosis was a national epidemic and there were sanitariums across the United States. When infected patients arrived for treatment, staff would often burn their clothes and other belongings to decrease the risk of contaminating others.

At the new sanitarium, native children sometimes arrived in their finest traditional regalia. Though by the late 1800s many Indians wore western-style clothing for daily wear, traditional clothes were still made by hand, and treasured for special occasions. Photographs of Native gatherings from around this time show Indians dressed in buckskin jackets and pants with ornate and detailed bead work. They are adorned with necklaces, earrings, belts, bags, scarves, and head pieces. In their hands are pouches, purses, staffs, and tomahawks. Some of these cultural objects may have been burned at this incinerator. Traditional regalia, some of it passed down for generations, went up in smoke.

The children were issued new clothes--simple wool or cotton skirts and blouses for the girls, collared shirts and dungarees for the boys. These were not simply white American styles, but those of working class Americans, reflecting the occupations of manual labor that children would be taught at Fort Spokane.

Recent archaeology has confirmed oral histories by uncovering beads and other remnants of native regalia that were brought to this incinerator to be burned.

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How do you move an entire town to a new location? Very carefully.

What happened to the houses, stores, and buildings that were threatened by the rising water of Lake Roosevelt in 1941? Some were torn down and their materials reused. Some were burned. Others, if in good condition, were actually picked up and moved.

The church in the picture above is a perfect example. It moved slowly up the hill to avoid the flooding waters that covered the arid landscape with hundreds of feet of water. The filling of the reservoir behind the 550 foot Grand Coulee Dam forced every animal and human that called the river banks home to relocate and change their way of life.

The Works Progress Administration, a New Deal Agency designed to put men to work, was responsible for clearing everything, including houses, railroad tracks, and trees, below an elevation of 1310 feet. Within the evacuation area were over a dozen towns and cities of varying sizes. One of the largest of those cities was Kettle Falls.

In the mid 1930s the residents of Kettle Falls began eyeing a new location for their city. According to the National Park Service, they were “unable to obtain land adjacent to St. Paul's mission, their first choice for a new town site.” Instead “Kettle Falls residents annexed the nearby higher town of Meyers Falls and a strip of land along the state highway connecting the two communities.” Once Meyers Falls was annexed the residents voted to change the name to Kettle Falls. The residents began moving their homes and businesses up the hill to newly annexed areas.

Walking through Kettle Falls today you would see many houses and buildings that were moved in the 1930s from the town site at the river’s edge. The Kettle Falls Community Church was originally built in the old town and it is still in use today. Parishioners flock from the surrounding areas to attend service on Sundays, much like they did before the church moved in the 1930s.

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A generation of Spokanites has fond memories of Cyrus O'Leary's--until the restaurant was demolished.

Spokanites love their restaurants, but only a few restaurants invoke nostalgia like Cyrus O’Leary, which closed in 2011. The unusual architecture of the building in combination with the “collectible gewgaws galore” made the environment family-friendly and unforgettable. Guests felt invited by the signed Elvis poster, large moose head, and vintage toys.

The restaurant was established in 1980 by Cyrus Vaughn. The building was built on the south side of the Bennet Block and cost $500,000 to construct. The architecture was interesting, it screamed of the 1970s. It was designed with a facade that gave it an old-time look. While this was part of its initial appeal, 30 years later it had become an eyesore in a modernizing Spokane.

In 2011, the residents of the Bennet Block began pressuring the owners of Cyrus O’Leary to update the building to match the changing aesthetic of the block. The two sides could not agree, and amidst an economic downturn the restaurant decided to close its doors for good in September of that year. The building was torn to the ground in 2012, but not all of its contents were lost.

Hoping to capitalize on the nostalgia factor, another local restaurateur purchased some of those iconic items like the moose head and the bar for his own establishment. If you want to relive some memories from Cyrus O’Leary’s restaurant you can visit those remnants of the famed eatery at the new location of David’s Pizza.

The fond memories surrounding Cyrus O’Leary’s restaurant are less focused on meals, and instead centered on the memories, experiences, and the pies.

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A midnight dynamite explosion shook the movie theater, sending slabs of marble, boards and debris flying into the street.

Theaters were staples of entertainment for Americans from the mid-1800s to the beginning of the 20th century. Theaters in these decades featured live entertainment including plays and vaudeville. Even small towns had their theaters (often grandiloquently named opera houses) and national and regional touring acts went from one town to the next.

By the 1920s theaters for live performances were being converted into converted for motion pictures. By 1920 Spokanites had fourteen moving picture theaters to choose from. One of those was the Lyric Theatre, located in the Lindelle Building at 10 North Washington.

The Lyric Theatre transitioned from traditional theatre entertainment to moving pictures when it was purchased by J. W. Allender in 1915. Allender, a theatre entrepreneur and local politician, turned the movie house into one of the most popular in town. Big ticket films like the 1918 hit “Carmen of the Klondike” frequented the Lyric until a fateful summer night in 1928.

In the early morning hours of July 6th, Officer Henry Morris paced down Washington Street stopping to examine storefronts as he passed. Around 1:30AM he stopped in front of the Lyric Theatre to see what movies were showing. As he continued down the road past Joyner’s Pharmacy, he heard a loud explosion that sent “slabs of marble, boards and debris” flying into the street in front of the theatre. No one was injured, but the damage was substantial. The ticket booth and the projection room had been ravaged by a powerful bomb.

The bomber was a sophisticated operator. The Chief of Police and his lead investigators found a “wheel” that appeared to be part of the bomb ignition mechanism. They also determined that dynamite was the fuel for the explosive. Even with all this information, the police were unable to find the culprit and the case went unsolved.

The theater reopened shortly after but business was never the same, just three years later, in 1932, it was converted to a Swedish Seventh Day Adventist Church. The church was short-lived and the Lindelle Building struggled to keep tenants in the former theatre. Proponents of modernization looked on as the building rapidly aged and the demand for parking in Downtown Spokane became greater. By late 1963 the building and the remnants of the Lyric Theatre were demolished in favor of a surface parking lot.

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The destruction of the Rookery Building was a turning point in historic preservation in Spokane.

The Great Depression plunged the United States into an economic downturn unlike any it had seen before. Spokane was not immune. Workers lost their jobs quickly and the local unemployment rate shot up to twenty-five percent. Even though the local situation was grim, men flocked to Spokane looking for work. Many ended up living in hobo jungles and in shanty towns of cardboard and wood scraps. But not everyone was building shanties. In the midst of the depression one of Spokane’s most famous buildings was constructed, The Rookery.

The Rookery Block was originally home to four buildings that made up a haphazard cluster of businesses, ranging from banks to physicians offices. As Spokane grew, speculators eyed the block as a potential investment but the existing buildings did not meet the needs of a rapidly modernizing city. In 1933, Charles Sweeny, a Civil War veteran turned businessman and aspiring politician, purchased the lots to tear the existing structures down and build something grand in their place.

Undeterred by the depression, Sweeny began construction of the new Rookery Building, completed in 1933. It was an instant hit. According to the Spokane Historic Preservation Office, the Rookery “was the premier Spokane example of terra cotta artistry employing Art Deco design elements.” Designed by Gustav Pehrson, the building had a “horizontal emphasis and stylistic design elements, including floral patterns, starbursts, chevrons and fans.” Although there were hundreds of Art Deco building in town, “high style Art Deco commercial buildings like the Rookery are relatively rare in Spokane.”

Though it had a beautiful debut, the Rookery did not age well. By the 1990s, Tenants were regularly complaining about the condition of the building and the owner was losing patience. In 2006 The Rookery was torn to the ground, to the dismay and anger of many Spokanites. An Inlander article from 2005 captures the frustration, “surface parking lots have spread like lesions across the face of downtown Spokane. Even though it's a ridiculous, inefficient use of land in an urban core, these parking lots, like smallpox scars, tend not to go away.”

Though the Rookery was lost, its destruction marked a turning point in Spokane's attitude towards historic preservation. The Spokane Preservation Advocates, a non-profit organization that advocates for historic preservation, were able to use the emotional lessons learned from the loss of the Rookery to lobby the city council to pass a demolition ordinance. This ordinance prohibits the “removal of historically eligible buildings without a plan to replace them with new structures.” This ordinance has halted the spread of surface parking lots but it cannot stop real estate developers from tearing down 100 year old buildings in favor of modern high rises.

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Tucked away in a corner of this odd-shaped parking lot, behind the historic Frank's Diner, is a sliver of Spokane history. Actually, a large granite block of history.

At the west end of the parking lot is a retaining wall made of mismatched bricks and pieces of salvaged buildings. On the bottom row is a large granite stone with the engraved (and upside down!) letters “MOHA."

This stone was once a part of the facade of the Mohawk Building, which stood on Riverside Avenue between Howard and Stevens. The Mohawk was built in 1915 to replace an earlier building that had been destroyed by fire. The Mohawk was built of terra cotta and brick by architect John K. Dow. It was most notable as the longtime home of one Spokane’s oldest businesses, Dodson’s Jewelers.

In 2007 developers made plans to tear down the Mohawk, and despite outcries from the historic preservation community, the building was razed. Dodson’s Jewelers moved their shop and iconic clock across the street.

Historic photographs of the Mohawk show that this is indeed the same stone that stood over the entrance for nearly 100 years. The Mohawk was demolished in favor of a surface parking lot, but through a quirk of fate one piece still remains--here in another parking lot.

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