Professional Plumber in Spokane, WA

A City's Journey Through Time

In that memorable year of 1873, when the westward tide of American ambition had scarce begun to breach the ramparts of the Inland Northwest, one James Nettle Glover, a man possessed of uncommon prescience and mercantile sagacity, first beheld the tumultuous cataracts of the Spokane. Where lesser mortals perceived but wilderness and the savage beauty of untamed waters, this visionary discerned the foundations of empire. From two rude squatters, Downing and Scranton by name, he procured—for the sum of four thousand dollars—both their primitive sawmill and their claim to one hundred and sixty acres of that commanding ground. The settlement, christened Spokan Falls in homage to the indigenous peoples whose appellation signified 'Children of the Sun,' achieved the dignity of incorporation on the twenty-ninth day of November, 1881, when its inhabitants numbered but one thousand souls. Yet fortune, that capricious deity who delights in testing the mettle of nascent civilizations, visited upon this flourishing town a conflagration of such magnitude on the fourth of August, 1889, that thirty-two city blocks were reduced to smoldering ash. Like the phoenix of antiquity, Spokane arose from these cinders with renewed vigor, its citizens erecting structures of brick and stone where wood had failed them. The year 1974 witnessed the city's apotheosis as host to that grand spectacle of human achievement, the World's Fair, distinguished as the first such exposition devoted to the preservation of Nature's dominion.