Jesse Tinsley

Starting around 1940, Sprouse Reitz variety stores began popping up around Spokane. For housewives, there were household and craft supplies. For kids, there was candy and small toys.

Spokane’s Felts Field is one of the oldest municipal, federally recognized airports. The historic airport also played a key role in the development of scheduled passenger service across the country.

One of the grandest homes in the Rockwood National Register Historic District was erected for pioneer attorney Edward J. Cannon and his wife, Helen, in 1911. The brick home in the Colonial Revival style is part of Spokane’s most exclusive and historic neighborhoods.

Townships were a way for rural areas to have a local government of their own, outside of cities and outside of county government. In Washington, only Spokane and Whatcom counties allowed townships to form a local government and levy property taxes to support it. The state approved townships in 1908.

The southwest corner of Riverside Avenue and Howard Street has been the epicenter of the Spokane banking business for more than 120 years.

The Looff Carrousel in Riverfront Park has its origins in the craftsmanship of Charles Looff, a German woodworker who emigrated to the United States in 1870.

Spokane was always a wheat town, anchored by its flouring mills, which supplied several large bakeries. One of the larger bakers was Silver Loaf Baking Company, which had a production plant on the north rim of the Spokane River gorge for almost 40 years.

One of the city’s biggest roadblocks for Expo ’74 was the tangle of steel rails that snaked across Havermale Island and along the shore of the river.

Spokane’s Playfair Race Course, started in 1901 when the land was also the county fairgrounds, was a modest operation compared to glamorous venues in California, Kentucky and New York.

The Spokane Humane Society is celebrating 120 years of caring for animals. Businessman W.S. McCrea, and others, helped start the SHS in 1897.

The European Renaissance-style garden in Manito Park that draws hundreds of thousands of visitors each summer was planted around Memorial Day of this year with tens of thousands of begonias, marigolds, dahlias, snapdragons, petunias, geraniums and others to create the profusion, color and elegant symmetry of a royal garden. It is now a feast for the eyes. It’s worth a visit for those who haven’t been recently.

If you were an early settler of the American west, having clean clothes to wear everyday was a luxury. Some of the first businesses in Spokane Falls in the 1880s and 1890s were laundries, which drew clean water from the river and stoked fires to boil or steam the dirt out of clothes.

Spokane’s water superintendent, Rolla A. Jones, was in Coeur d’Alene doing repairs on a steamboat he owned when Spokane’s great fire of 1889 broke out.

In 1968, Glen Yake, who was Spokane’s city engineer from the 1950s to the 1980s, said: “Water is Spokane’s greatest asset.” He said that major urban areas that had seen rationing had enough water to pump but had inadequate storage reservoirs during low-water periods.

In the early 1960s, business and city leaders believed that Spokane needed something to bring it out of its funk. The economy was stagnant. Railroads were still shipping, but passenger service had declined. The downtown seemed dingy and industrial. Culturally, Spokane seemed stuck in the past.

Fueled by a lucky stake in a productive silver mine, Levi “Al” Hutton and May Arkwright built the Hutton building in 1906.

Catholics in Spokane formed the Catholic Social Betterment League in 1912, bringing together people from eight parishes to tackle social needs. They wanted to feed the hungry, clothe the naked and help the elderly and sick.

Before the 1960s, Stevens Street only went up the South Hill to Seventh Avenue, blocked by the cliff above and the expansive estate of Daniel Corbin, which was purchased by the city park board in 1945. But as early as the 1930s, city officials had been researching another way up the hill to relieve congestion on Grand Boulevard.

Spokane was booming in the 1890s, the population was growing rapidly and clubs, lodges and fraternal organizations were bursting at the seams. The Spokane Amateur Athletic Club organized in 1891 with the boast that their facilities would offer not only the best billiards and bowling, but also gym facilities for fitness.

Thomas J. Pedicord, born 1859 in Ohio and raised in Iowa, arrived in Spokane in 1889. In 1895, he took over the Gillette Hotel, first built by millionaire F. Lewis Clark in 1893, and renamed it after himself.

Baseball has been a staple of summer entertainment in Spokane since the 1890s. Spokane baseball teams carried names like the Hawks, Bunchgrassers, Blue Stockings and Smoke Eaters. But in 1940, the name Indians, used in the aughts and teens, returned to stay.

Entrepreneur Albert R. Pratt built a legacy in furniture in Spokane, in an area now incorporated into the River Park Square development.

In early Spokane, parks were primarily natural spaces used for picnics. When Parks Superintendent John W. Duncan retired in 1942, Spokane’s park system included more parks, plus features like playgrounds, swimming pools, golf courses and sports courts and fields. Duncan was born in Aberdeen, Scotland, and came to the United States as a boy. He studied park management and worked in Boston. He passed through Spokane in 1909 on his way to a convention in Seattle and returned the next year to become the city’s park superintendent.

Edward L. Powell was 11 years old when his family moved west by covered wagon from Ohio to Oregon in 1862. After studying civil engineering, he worked for the railroad. But his health was poor and he couldn’t keep up with the railroad life. So he went to teach school in Walla Walla, then operate a general store in Waitsburg for 18 years.