Lilac City Wanderers of Spokane

Lilac City Wanderers of Spokane Exploring Greater Spokane's historic places, waterfalls, cemeteries, ghost towns, back roads, monuments, and any other cool stuff we find wandering around
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🥾Another Ghost of the Palouse I wonder who the family was that lived here. What they grew, what they hoped for, why they...
06/17/2026

🥾Another Ghost of the Palouse
I wonder who the family was that lived here. What they grew, what they hoped for, why they left….
Washtucna, Washington
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🥾Our wanders up north to the Washington Hotel in Metaline Falls, WA Town founder Lewis P. Larson built this 3-story bric...
06/16/2026

🥾Our wanders up north to the Washington Hotel in Metaline Falls, WA
Town founder Lewis P. Larson built this 3-story brick hotel in 1910 for $15,000 the same year the railroad arrived. Downstairs held the U.S. Customs office for the Canadian border; upstairs Larson kept his mining office. Lost to the cement company in 1914, run as a boarding house until the 1970s, then listed on the National Register in 1979. Still standing on 5th & Washington, still hosting travelers.
👉Do you have a story about your stay here? We would love to hear it!

Antique Post card of  Coeur d’Alene Park, Spokane Washington’s first Park.EST 1891
06/09/2026

Antique Post card of  Coeur d’Alene Park, Spokane Washington’s first Park.
EST 1891

⛪️We stopped to take in this gorgeous old downtown Spokane church — turns out we were standing where Father's Day was bo...
06/09/2026

⛪️We stopped to take in this gorgeous old downtown Spokane church — turns out we were standing where Father's Day was born. Back when it was Central Methodist Episcopal, (and then Central United Methodist and now Zeal Church), Sonora Smart Dodd sat through a 1909 Mother's Day sermon here and left determined to honor dads too; by June 19, 1910, Spokane was celebrating the very first Father's Day.

🏡The Historic Undercliff House, 703 W 7th Ave, Spokane Washington.This beautiful old mansion was built in 1896 for flour...
06/05/2026

🏡The Historic Undercliff House, 703 W 7th Ave, Spokane Washington.
This beautiful old mansion was built in 1896 for flour-mill magnate F. Lewis Clark and designed by Kirtland Cutter as a Tudor Revival party house — ballroom, billiard room, English gardens with red brick paths, all set into the basalt bluff with its stone gatehouse still at the street. Clark vanished on a walk in Santa Barbara on Jan 17, 1914 and was never found. He'd sold the mansion to B.L. Gordon in 1909 for $100,000; Gordon's widow donated it in 1929 and it became Marycliff High School until the school closed in 1979. Today its offices, and a contributing property in the Marycliff-Cliff Park Historic District listed on the National Register in 1979.

🥾Wandered onto the Old Pharmacy Building At Dalton and Argonne in Millwood, Washington.~This two-story red brick buildin...
06/04/2026

🥾Wandered onto the Old Pharmacy Building At Dalton and Argonne in Millwood, Washington.~
This two-story red brick building at 3301 N Argonne anchors the town's historic business block. Known locally as the Brown Building, it was built in the early 1920s as a drugstore by George Brown, and in August 1925 J. Elbert Tiffin purchased the site and opened the town's longest-running pharmacy on the ground floor. Through the 1920s and 1930s it was known as Tiffin's Pharmacy, often called simply the Millwood Pharmacy, selling prescriptions, penny candy, and gifts from behind a built-in soda fountain. The Tiffins lived in the back apartments upstairs, while the front second-story offices were rented to Dr. Neil Bayne, a dentist brought in by the paper company, and Dr. Lyle Bailey. Constructed of brick-veneered clay tile, the 1925 building retains its original corner entrance, doors, windows, galvanized cornice, and patterned brickwork with cream tile accents. It is a contributing property in the Millwood Historic District, a National Register district roughly bounded by Argonne and Sargent Roads and by Euclid and Liberty Avenues that developed between 1910 and 1950 around the Inland Empire Paper Company mill. Millwood took its name from "mill" and the Woodard family farm, and Argonne Road was renamed in 1920 when the valley bridge was dedicated to the WWI Battle of the Argonne Woods. Today the former pharmacy continues as Corner Door Fountain & Books, where a marble counter replicates the original soda fountain bar.

🥾I took a wrong turn today and found this cool old castle pump house ~Vera Water and Power's Pump House No. 1 at 601 N E...
05/31/2026

🥾I took a wrong turn today and found this cool old castle pump house

~Vera Water and Power's Pump House No. 1 at 601 N Evergreen Rd in Spokane Valley~
It is the cobblestone "castle" hand-built in 1906 from stones pulled from irrigation ditches and traditionally credited to mason Hans Vinge.
The well beneath it was hand-dug in 1907-08 to more than 100 feet deep for the Vera Electric Water Company, founded in 1908 by Donald K. McDonald and named for his daughter.
A 1961 upgrade installed a 3,000-gallon-per-minute pump, following the system's conversion to high-pressure service in 1957. Designated a national landmark by the American Water Works Association in 1977, the Number 1 well is still in service after 120 years.

~FOR THE PIONEERS OF SPOKANE~This Memorial Day weekend we’re wandering a little slower on purpose, in memory of the pion...
05/24/2026

~FOR THE PIONEERS OF SPOKANE~
This Memorial Day weekend we’re wandering a little slower on purpose, in memory of the pioneers of Spokane Washington.
Before there were sidewalks, there were the Spokanes — “Children of the Sun” — who fished these falls for centuries and welcomed other tribes here for salmon, trade, games, and celebration. When the Spokane Reservation was set aside in 1881, and dams built from 1908 changed the river, their salmon life was altered forever, but their name stayed on the city.
Then came the ones who saw potential in the roar. Fur trader David Thompson explored the upper Columbia starting in 1807, and in 1810 his North West Company built Spokane House near the Little Spokane — the first long-term non-Native settlement in Washington.
In 1873 James N. Glover bought a little sawmill claim and quietly became known as the “Father of Spokane.” With Anthony M. Cannon, our first banker, and John J. Browne, our first lawyer, they platted streets, opened stores, and bet everything on a town at the falls.
They weren’t alone, and they weren’t all the same. In the 1880s John Bryon Parker and his wife Adella opened Spokane’s first Black-owned barbershop, and Peter B. Barrow helped found Calvary Baptist Church. Finnish families made Peaceful Valley home. Chinese merchants ran laundries downtown, Italian stonemasons helped lay the brick that rebuilt after the fire, and German, Chinese, and Italian neighbors built enclaves the city histories still note.
May Arkwright Hutton — miner, suffragist, loud and unapologetic — fought for the vote, and Washington women won it in 1910.
On August 4, 1889 the Great Fire erased 32 blocks in one night. The pioneers didn’t leave. They pitched tents, reopened shops the next morning, and rebuilt in brick and stone. That stubborn hope is why we still walk the brick downtown they left us, and later landmarks like the 1895 Flour Mill and the 1914 Davenport Hotel.
Every Lilac City walk follows their footprints:
• The Centennial Trail follows the river corridor used for centuries, a route that grew from ancient Indigenous heritage.
• Browne’s Addition is literally named for John Browne, platted from his 1880s homestead.
• The lilacs at Manito were planted in the early 1900s and championed by women’s clubs who believed a frontier town deserved beauty.
🥾So this Memorial Day, if you’re out and about, take a minute to really see this beautiful city our pioneers built. Pause at the falls the way they first did. And most important, stop and smell the lilacs.

🥾Our adventures took us West today towards Davenport WA and Lake Roosevelt natural recreation area.… Here’s a monument ...
05/24/2026

🥾Our adventures took us West today towards Davenport WA and Lake Roosevelt natural recreation area.… Here’s a monument that we stopped at along the way
The Battle of Spokane Plains — September 5, 1858
Sign Reads: In 1858, war came to the homeland of the Spokane people. The tranquility of 10,000 years was ended near where you now stand. The opening of the Oregon Trail brought immigrant cohesion from across the United States onto the land where the Spokane Indians had lived as semi-nomadic indigenous people since time immemorial. Spokane people had two choices: take up arms to defend their land, resource, and children, and way of life, or allow the immigrants to take everything without a fight. The first battle was on May 17th, 1858, 50 miles south of here at a place which came to be known as Steptoe Butte or Pine Creek—known by the Nez Perce military scouts as Te-Hoto-Nim-Me, and to the Coeur d'Alenes as Neqotemqn. Following a daylong battle, approximately 160 U.S. Army soldiers on patrol under the command of Lieutenant Colonel [Edward] Steptoe were surrounded on a hilltop by united Spokane, Palouse, Yakima, and Coeur d'Alene warriors. Influenced by Catholic Priest Joseph Joset, the Council of Allies forces allowed the soldiers to escape in the night, abandoning most of their supplies and retreating under the cover of darkness. Embarrassed by the defeat, the U.S. Army sent a retaliatory force of nearly 1,000 men under the command of Colonel George Wright. He had orders to, "attack all the hostile Indians you meet, with vigor, make their punishment severe and persevere until the submission of all is complete and permanent."On September 1st, six miles north of here, allied tribal warriors fought against Wright's forces at the Battle of Four Lakes. In this engagement, the warriors encountered the increased killing range and accuracy of the Army's newly issued long range rifles and had to retreat. On September 5th, the Battle of Spokane Plains was fought. The running battle covered the area of today's Fairchild Air Force Base and skirted the present day Spokane Tribe Casino. Fighting ended eight miles north of today's Northern Quest Casino. The Spokanes referred to this battle as "Fire on the Plains" due to the grasslands they lit to gain a tactical advantage against the Army's superior weaponry. In the days after the battle, without meeting any further resistance, the U.S. Army used a scorched-earth strategy. Colonel Wright ordered the slaughter of nearly 900 Coeur d'Alene horses in a site between Spokane Falls and Lake Coeur d'Alene, [Idaho]. Tribal cache houses were completely burned along Hangman Creek, a peace treaty signing location. In the winter months that followed, several treaties were signed. Today, tribal camps protect a vibrant and thriving community. In modern times, many descendants of the original warriors remain here, both proud of the initial victories to which they stood resolved by force. — Warren Seyler, Spokane Tribe of Indians, 2013
👉👉 How to get there-
The Spokane Plains Battlefield State Park Heritage Site is located right along U.S. Route 2 in Airway Heights, Washington, just west of Spokane.
Coordinates: 47°38'37.0"N, 117°39'12.2"W (47.6436, -117.6534)

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Spokane, WA

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