100 years ago in Spokane: Pioneer mason who said he planned school with Lincoln dies at 96

From our archives,

100 years ago

Anson A. Pike, a pioneer stone mason and compatriot of Abraham Lincoln and John C. Fremont, died at age 96 in his Spokane home.

His life spanned a huge swath of American history. Before his death, he claimed to be the last known survivor of Fremont’s famous expedition to California and the oldest living Masonic Lodge member in the U.S.

He was the son of an Army captain and spent his early years at Fort Napier, “a frontier outpost 36 miles from Chicago.”

He remembered Chicago as nothing but a fort “with one white child living there.”

While in Bloomington, Illinois, Pike claimed that he and the “school superintendent” – Abraham Lincoln – together “planned the first brick and stone school house” in that city, which Pike subsequently built.

(We should note here that Lincoln was never the Bloomington school superintendent, but he did serve as the attorney for the school district.)

With Fremont, Pike claimed to be present in the little village of Los Angeles when the Mexican flag was torn down and the Stars and Stripes raised in its place.

Decades later he settled in Spokane and helped rebuild the city in stone after the Spokane’s Great Fire of 1889.

He worked on the Granite Building, among others.