Marking History County Seeks Home For Monument On Mullan’S Route Across Valley

They crossed the heart of the Spokane Valley in 1859, blazing a road that cut to the northeast and crossed the river at Plante’s Ferry.

Pushing eastward from Fort Walla Walla, Capt. John Mullan and his crew surveyed and graded a 624-mile military road across the west to Fort Benton, Mont., linking the Columbia and Missouri rivers.

In 1922, the Washington State Historical Society erected a monument to mark the route Mullan chose across the Spokane Valley. It still stands near the intersection of Sprague Avenue and Vista Road.

Clad in smooth cobblestones that once littered the Valley floor, the distinctive pyramid marker now stands in the way of modern road builders. It blocks the path of a sidewalk planned for Sprague Avenue and county officials are searching for a place to move it.

“It can’t really stay exactly in the same place,” says Ross Kelley, assistant engineer for Spokane County.

For the last six months or more, county officials and historians have been trying to decide what to do with the Mullan Road marker.

The sidewalk improvements are part of the Valley Couplet project. Scheduled to open in October, the couplet is designed to ease traffic on Interstate 90. It will have five westbound lanes on Sprague Avenue, while eastbound traffic will be routed onto a new four-lane roadway being built along First and Second avenues.

Tom Yake, management systems engineer, says the county first considered just pushing the monument back far enough from Sprague Avenue to make room for the sidewalk. But Spokane County owns only 10 feet of land adjacent to the road in front of the business where the monument sits.

A sidewalk that meets the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act must be 6 feet wide, county engineers say, leaving just 3 feet for the monument. The base of the marker is about 7 feet square.

Yake says the county tried to negotiate with the landowner to buy enough space there so the monument could be moved back from the road, but they could not reach an agreement.

Jack Riley, who owns the land and leases out the building to La Leyendas Plantation restaurant, says he is already losing nine parking spaces to make way for the sidewalk and can’t afford to sell the county any more space.

“We’re hurting for parking now,” he says. “It’s killing us.”

He tried to work out a trade for county land to gain more parking behind the restaurant, but later decided it was too expensive to build a new lot.

Riley says although he’s not crazy about the idea, he also offered to donate land underneath the La Leyendas Plantation sign for the monument. The top of the stone marker would have to be lopped off so it could fit under the neon signs and readerboard.

More than anything else, the Mullan Road marker has become a lightning rod for lingering concerns among Sprague Avenue business owners such as Riley about the new couplet.

“I’m especially concerned about how this is going to affect our property values and our businesses,” Riley says. “It’s going to cut our traffic in half.”

The Spokane Valley Business Association, which sued the county in 1994 to stop an earlier proposal for a Valley commuter route, has called a meeting for Wednesday with county officials to talk about the new sidewalks along Sprague and the fate of the Mullan Road marker.

The business association opposed the original proposal for the South Valley Arterial, which would have been a limited-access, high-speed road, saying it would pull customers away from their Sprague Avenue businesses.

When the county later proposed the couplet system at a compromise, business association leaders lauded the county’s efforts to come up with an alternative to address business owners’ concerns.

Only one person spoke against the Valley couplet at a public hearing in 1997 before county commissioners approved the project. Others encouraged engineers to keep working with Sprague Avenue business owners on the final details, including the number of lanes planned for Sprague and frequency of streets connecting the couplet’s two legs.

Despite his reluctance to sell the county land for the monument, Riley says the last thing he wants is to have it moved or destroyed.

“That monument is our heritage. It’s been there since 1922,” Riley says. “It should be left alone. That’s the way I see it.”

He says he’ll suggest at the Wednesday meeting that county officials redesign the lanes on Sprague Avenue so the sidewalk can be built north of the monument. There’s room, he says, because engineers are reducing the number of lanes on Sprague from seven to five.

In the meantime, because Riley has refused to sell any land, county officials are still considering other options for the monument.

Teresa Brum, of the Spokane city-county historic preservation office, says she’s been working with engineers for about six months to find the best way to preserve the monument.

“They have been very respectful of the marker and its significance,” Brum says. “I think that it’s great that the county is taking responsibility for it and taking steps to make sure it is handled properly.”

If the monument must be moved, she says, county officials need to make sure it still marks the Mullan Road’s historic path across the Valley.

Yake says engineers have evaluated everything from moving the marker to Plantes Ferry Park, where the Mullan Road crossed the Spokane River, to removing the plaque from the stone-clad pyramid and putting it in a smaller monument.

The county ruled out moving the marker a long distance after engineers cored the stone-and-concrete structure and determined it was solid and weighed an estimated 7 tons, Yake says.

“The risk of the whole thing falling apart is just too great,” he says.

Also, they ruled out removing the plaque from the monument because it’s too fragile.

“We were afraid we might take it out and it would break, which is something we wouldn’t want to happen under any circumstances,” he says.

Unless Riley changes his mind, Yake says, the best alternative right now is to push the monument back from Sprague Avenue, narrow the sidewalk in front of the marker and shave off the front and back of the base so it fits on land the county owns in front of La Leyendas Plantation.

However, Yake says, everyone would prefer to keep the monument intact.

A final decision on the Mullan Road marker will have to be made by early summer. Construction in that area is scheduled to start in July or August, Kelley says.

“It’s just one of those things that has been laying around here for a couple of years and we’d just like to see some resolution.”