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Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883
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Then and Now: Howard Street honors general

Present day: This view looks the same direction down Howard from First. (Jesse Tinsley)
Present day: This view looks the same direction down Howard from First. (Jesse Tinsley)Buy a print of this photo

After James Glover bought 160 acres from Spokane’s original settlers, he started drawing and naming the streets on the plat map.

His store and livery stables sat on Front, now Spokane Falls Boulevard. He named streets for mill builder Frederick Post and businessman J.J. Browne. And he named the wide north-south street by his store after Gen. Oliver O. Howard, the Army commander who fought Indian uprisings across the region in the 1870s.

Howard, born in 1830, graduated from the U.S. Army Military Academy in 1854. He commanded units in many key battles of the Civil War. He received the Medal of Honor for his role in the Battle of Fair Oaks, where he lost his right arm.

But he is best known for his role in the Reconstruction period. In 1865, Howard, nicknamed “the Christian general” for his religious faith, became commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau, which tried to help freed slaves integrate into society. Howard designed programs for standardized wages, delivering food rations, building schools and medical facilities, and helping blacks organize politically.

It wasn’t easy. “In 1865, 1866 and 1877 mobs of the baser classes at intervals and in all parts of the South occasionally burned school buildings and churches used as schools, flogged teachers or drove them away, and in a number of instances murdered them,” he said.

He helped found Howard Normal and Theological Institute for the Education of Preachers and Teachers, now Howard University, as a place where freed slaves, both men and women, could get an education. He served as president from 1869-1874.

But after 1874, he was based at Fort Vancouver and commanded U.S. Army troops fighting Indians in the West, especially the Nez Perce. He stationed soldiers around Glover’s store in 1877, reassuring the new white settlers that peace and security was possible in Spokane Falls. He served as superintendent of West Point in 1880-1882.

Howard retired with two stars in 1894 and died in 1909 in Burlington, Vermont.

– Jesse Tinsley