Spokane history goes on the block

The three women eyed the horsedrawn carriage like it was a four-carat diamond.

They ran their hands across the leather seat and padded satin lining, peered through the round window at the back that resembles a ship portal. They looked under the black carpeting to find worn linoleum that resembles caning. They toyed with the loosened trim, lifting it to discover even older trim beneath. They examined a pillow-shaped, metal foot warmer complete with coal drawer.

The three women - two from the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and one from the Campbell House - scrutinized nearly every inch of the 1887 brougham (pronounced “brome”) once owned by the D.C. Corbin family of Spokane.

“You know, ladies, if you buy it, you can do this every day,” said Jeff Owens, the Spokane auctioneer who plans to sell the brougham this weekend.

“Once we buy it, it becomes part of the museum, and we can’t do this anymore,” said Patti Larkin, curator for the Campbell House.

On a recent, brilliantly sunny morning, Larkin and Marsha Rooney, the MAC’s curator of history, traveled to a warehouse and office off East Broadway to take photographs and gather information about the brougham. With the help of Lorna Walsh, the MAC’s chief development officer, they hope to find money to buy the brougham for the museum.

The vehicle collection that includes the brougham is owned by the estate of M.G. Curtis, a Spokane contractor who supplied the aggregate for many of the region’s dams, among them Hungry Horse, Boundary and Ice Harbor, said Curtis’s son, Alan, of Priest River. An avid antiques collector, M.G. Curtis bought the brougham at auction in Montana in 1989.

Also up for auction will be seven other horsedrawn carriages, a rickshaw and a 1929 Ford Sport Coupe reportedly driven by Robert Redford in “The Sting.”

“He was quite the collector,” Curtis said, noting that his dad grew up on a farm in the early 1900s and loved all things mechanical.

Documents on the brougham, including a Spokesman-Review clipping, indicate this “Rolls Royce” of carriages was bought for $1,700 in 1887 by the wife of mining and railroad magnate Corbin. The brougham is worth between $15,000 to $20,000 today, Owens said.

According to the paperwork and old photographs, Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt both rode through Washington, D.C., in broughams, which were built by Van Taissille and Kearney of New York City.

Spokane mining magnate Amasa Campbell also owned a brougham in the early 1900s, Larkin said, pulling out a photo that shows Campbell’s daughter, Helen, sitting in one outside the Campbell home in Browne’s Addition.

“It’s rare to find something with a local provenance,” Larkin said. “We look for that with all the things we collect. The horse culture was an important part of Spokane’s history.”

Walsh said that while the museum doesn’t have much money for new acquisitions, the brougham is special. “We’d love to have it because it fits with the (Campbell) house,” she said.

After spending nearly an hour taking photographs of the brougham and exploring it contents, curator Rooney gave the carriage high marks.

“I’d give it an ‘A,’ almost an ‘A-plus,’” she said.