Then & Now Galleries

William Murphy founded one of Spokane's most enduring and important businesses, Central Pre-Mix, in 1930s, a time where moving wet concrete by truck was still a new idea. Although the Murphy family sold the company in 1997, it is still a critical piece of the building industry in the region

Just a few years after Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his new invention, Charles B. Hopkins installed the first telephones in the Inland Northwest. In 1884, he bought an old Army telegraph line between Colfax and Almota, on the Snake River, for a $20 gold piece. He installed phones at each end.

Stuart D. Wilson, born around 1874, is remembered for waffles and bacon grease, among other things.

John D. Sherwood was born in San Francisco in 1860. He was a new Harvard graduate when he arrived in Spokane on a Northern Pacific passenger train in 1883.

Five stores formed United Retail Merchants in 1921 to pool their buying resources. The co-op, owned by its members, was designed to take the workload of sourcing and ordering off the shoulders of the local store manager and give smaller stores the purchasing clout to compete with growing chains, such as George Christensen’s Piggly Wiggly chain and Charles Marr’s MacMarr stores.

In 1961, David Cohn, of Seattle, built a new South Seas-themed restaurant on Pier 51 in Seattle. He called it The Polynesia. A few years later, he constructed an identical restaurant above the Spokane Falls and opened Spokane's own Polynesia in 1965.

Brothers Vaughn and Leo Sanders were loggers who also ran a silver mine and a lumber mill in Northport.

Austin Sperry founded the Sperry Flour Co. in Stockton, California, around 1850. At that time, California's gold rush miners were fed with flour shipped from South America and the East Coast. Sperry got his mill up and running, and farmers there began to plant wheat.

In 1938, the Creamery opened a new production facility at 408 E. Sprague Ave., a former car dealership. The front of the building housed Benewah Market, a grocery store. Instead of separate dealers for various products, owner Paul E. Newport stocked a wide variety of goods. He also introduced paper containers for milk.

At the start of the 20th century, most of the buildings along Front Street, which is now Spokane Falls Boulevard, were saloons and lodging houses catering to railroad workers and weary travelers - especially those who didn't want to spend much money on a night's sleep.

The massive 1889 fire destroyed more than 30 blocks of the downtown area, including the southeast corner of Howard Street and Riverside Avenue. After the fire, on that corner rose the Rookery, a block of four connected buildings that housed banks, lawyers, dry goods and many other business activities in the heart of the city.

Engineer and contractor Arthur S. Eldridge was born around 1874 in Flint, Michigan. Following his father, an engineer, to work, he built barges to dredge New York Harbor, bridges and buildings in Oregon and a Navy base in the Philippines.

The great fire of 1889 swept through Spokane, destroying his business and most of downtown. Louis Ziegler was one of the first to rebuild, erecting the elegant five-story Ziegler Building that would be the tallest building in town until the seven-story Review Tower in 1891.

The Spokane Humane Society, which formed around 1897, became the city dog pound in the early 1900s and had a building on the north shore of the Spokane River. The organization stepped away from enforcing animal laws in the 1960s but still continues to rescue and care for animals and adopt them out.

The barber shop in the Peyton Building became the center of Civil Rights controversy in 1963 when John W. Wheeler refused to cut the hair of a Liberian college student.

The diocese commissioned architect Harold C. Whitehouse, a church member, to design a Gothic cathedral in the English tradition. Builder Fred Phair laid the stone, which came from Washington, Idaho and Indiana. A yearslong fundraising effort paid for the main church to be built at 12th Avenue and Grand Boulevard between 1925 and 1929. Cost of the initial structure was estimated at $500,000.

The first Salvation Army workers were earnest street preachers, many of them women, who lectured strangers and argued with people who didn’t always want to hear their message.

Before the early 20th century, it was wise to question the credentials of the man with the pliers. An ad for one of the many New York Dental Parlors proclaimed, “We guarantee all work to be done by good reliable workmen!”