Jim Kershner’s this day in history

From our archives, 100 years ago

The Davenport Hotel had been open for about two weeks, but it was finally time for what a headline called the “Greatest Opening for the Greatest Hotel.”

It was the Davenport Hotel’s formal dedication ceremony, attended by Washington Gov. Ernest Lister, Spokane Mayor W.J. Hindley and officials from Idaho and Montana. A “throng of 1,000” from “every corner of the Inland Empire” attended the formal banquet.

Lister expressed “the respect of the entire state for the public spirit and good citizenship shown by the city of Spokane in the erection of this magnificent hotel.”

“It has placed the city in the front rank of all the communities of the United States and has made it a place of which the state may well be proud,” said the governor.

Mayor Hindley remarked that the magnificent Davenport Hotel “was a far cry” from the city’s first wooden hostelry, the California House, and from “Mr. Davenport’s now familiar waffle wagon.” He said “we almost stand amazed” at the transformation.

Marguerite Motie, the city’s Miss Spokane, formally “presented the hotel” to the visiting dignitaries.

In the banquet that followed, the crowd was entertained by Leonardo Brill’s orchestra and a 100-voice men’s choir, singing such tunes as “A Bedouin Song” and “Darling Nellie Gray.”