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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Business cards and a bullet hole


Ron Oscarson talks about finding three business cards from 1919 inside the courthouse flagpole's hollow round top. 
 (Holly Pickett / The Spokesman-Review)

Ron Oscarson doesn’t have the Einstein hair or Doc’s bulging eyes but he has gone back to the day lightning struck the courthouse.

Oscarson also lacked the time-traveling DeLorean of “Back to the Future,” so he used a high-flying copper ball. A sort of time capsule, actually, but not the typical box under a cornerstone.

Oscarson’s capsule was atop the Spokane County Courthouse flagpole when the pole was removed last December.

The decorative ball had been pierced by a bullet, allowing Oscarson, the county facilities director, to look inside with a tiny flashlight. He discovered several badly weathered business cards, but he couldn’t read enough to understand their full significance.

“For a long time, I didn’t dare cut it open,” Oscarson said.

Finally, early last month, “curiosity got the better of us,” he said.

Oscarson directed his staff to open a soldered plate that sealed the opening through which three groups of tradesmen inserted their business cards when the flagpole was installed in October 1919.

Displaying the bullet-pierced ball and its hidden treasure, Oscarson exhibits all the enthusiasm of actor Christopher Lloyd’s character in 1985’s “Back to the Future.”

“Is this the greatest job in the world or what?” said the keeper of Spokane County’s historic landmark courthouse. “I have the keys to the castle.”

Oscarson knew from old photographs that the flagpole wasn’t the one on the building when the structure was completed in November 1895. But he didn’t know why the pole was replaced.

The business cards – exposed to the elements by in-and-out bullet holes – were badly deteriorated. Just enough of the handwritten notes on the cards was still legible to indicate the previous flagpole had been struck by lightning.

Efforts to find newspaper accounts of the lightning strike have been unsuccessful.

The business cards came from an unidentifiable “jobbing specialty” company at 712 Perry, the C.B. Walker sheet metal contracting firm at 1820 Monroe, and Reinhardt and Schrimpf at Riverside and Monroe, across Riverside from the Review Building – where the U.S. Courthouse now stands.

Reinhardt and Shrimpf specialized in galvanized iron, copper cornice, skylights and the “Celebrated Novelty Hot Air Furnaces.”

While solving one mystery, the flagpole “time capsule” created another: Who put that bullet through it?

One might have suspected one of Oscarson’s predecessors, building superintendent Tom Allen, who declared war on pigeons in 1947. However, Allen reportedly picked them off with a .22-caliber rifle and the hole in the flagpole ball appears to have been made with a .30-caliber weapon.

The replacement flagpole was blown atilt by a windstorm Nov. 21, 87 years after the lightning strike. One of the pole’s rotted wooden supports had broken.

With 50 feet of steel pipe listing about 4 degrees from the 168-foot-tall courthouse tower and with 10 more feet of pipe inside the tower, Oscarson said he couldn’t sleep until a crane crew removed the 2,000-pound pole Dec. 1.

Replacing the flagpole is a small part of the work county officials hope to accomplish with a $2 million grant commissioners voted earlier this month to seek from the state Department of Archaeology and Historic Preservation.

Oscarson envisions a replacement pole of anodized aluminum, which would greatly reduce the weight and eliminate the need to pay a steeplejack a couple of thousand dollars every five years or so to repaint the pole. Plans also call for the pole to be shorter, more like the estimated 35-foot height of the original.

The state grant would require the county to put up $2 million. The grant would come from a $5 million allocation in the 2007-09 biennium, for which 32 counties with historic courthouses are eligible to apply.

A 13-member committee will review applications in June and award grants in early July for preservation and restoration work.

Many of the state’s historic courthouses are no longer used as courthouses. Spokane County’s courthouse can’t match the Columbia County Courthouse in Dayton, built in 1887, for continuous use – but its French Renaissance style is unique.

Several 16th-century châteaux in the Loire Valley of France appear to have inspired architect Willis A. Ritchie, whose plan was chosen in an 1893 contest. Ritchie’s design particularly resembles the Château d’Azay-le-Rideau on an island in the Indre River, near Tours, according to Chris Moore, field director for the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation.

Moore said he also sees similarities to the Romanesque-style Jefferson County Courthouse in Port Townsend – one of six Washington courthouses Ritchie designed.

“I like to think that those two courthouses really have a dialogue with each other at opposite ends of the state,” Moore said. “They are both very iconic for their towers.”

Ritchie intended both towers to have clocks, but Spokane County’s was built without one. County officials thought about adding a clock in 1946, but decided against it after placing a mock clock on the tower so people could see how it would look.

Although the courthouse exterior evokes fairy tale images, “you go through the doors and it’s kind of a letdown,” Oscarson said. The letdown starts with the grocery store-style metal doors he wants to replace.

“We haven’t always treated this building well,” Oscarson said of numerous expansion and renovation projects that filled in the U-shaped building’s courtyard with a boxlike annex, lowered the 19 1/2-foot vaulted ceilings of its courtrooms and removed grand exterior steps to the second floor.

Those steps, on the east and west sides of the building, led to the main public entrances. The first floor originally was more like an empty basement, with so much unused space that some public officials set up housekeeping – until judges complained about cooking odors.

Filling in the courtyard – where prisoners once took their exercise and George Webster was hanged – eliminated the windows that once lighted the big, twin-return interior staircase. One branch of the staircase was blocked at the fourth floor to make room for a women’s restroom.

“We have done some rather unsympathetic things to the courthouse,” Oscarson said. “They didn’t seem to care what they did to the building.”

That’s a common problem in historic courthouses, Moore said.

Spokane County officials received an engineering report a couple of months ago, and have started work on a project to move the auditor’s office from the second floor to the northwest corner of the ground floor.

Plans call for the treasurer’s office also to be moved to the ground floor, and for the family law courtroom on the ground floor – and the metal detectors that go with it – to be moved to the second floor. Then people will be able to pay their taxes and register to vote without being searched.

Oscarson knows he can’t restore the courthouse to its original condition, but he hopes to give it a more “period” look wherever possible.

The work has given some glimpses of the courthouse’s history and lost grandeur.

A few long-hidden examples of the delicately painted designs on the original wainscoting can be seen. Demolition of what is now an interior wall revealed some of the window bars that once kept prisoners from breaking into the building’s east and west wings from the courtyard.

The demolition also uncovered shoddy workmanship in past renovations that may have weakened the building.

“That almost makes me cry,” Oscarson said, pointing out places where workmen used sledge hammers to knock 18-inch holes through brick walls to accommodate 2-inch pipes.

In another example of strength-sapping abuse, many of the hollow, interlocking terra cotta masonry blocks that support the second floor were riddled with holes so contractors could hang a new first-floor ceiling from them.

Generally, though, the new engineering study concludes the courthouse has “very few signs of significant distress” and could serve the county far into the future with proper repairs and maintenance.