Millwood Historic District

About this property

The Millwood Historic District in Millwood, Washington is a 20-acre (8.1 ha) historic district that was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. The listing included 69 contributing buildings and one other contributing site. It includes work by architect Harold Whitehouse. Millwood is a suburb of Spokane located along the Spokane River about a mile east of the Spokane city limits and surrounded on three sides by the City of Spokane Valley. It is a mostly flat area to the south of the Spokane River on the valley floor. The Millwood Historic District occupies roughly eight square blocks in the northwest quadrant of Millwood. It is bounded by Euclid Avenue on the south, Argonne Road on the east and stretches to include the west side of Sargent Road on the west and the north side of Liberty Avenue on the north. A railroad track runs immediately south of Euclid Avenue. It was the first area developed in Millwood, with the bulk of the development coming between the 1920s and 1940s. There is a distinct difference in the architecture and tree canopy between the historic district and the rest of the residential and commercial areas of Millwood which were developed more recently. The boundary between the historic district and the rest of the city is obvious to see in most places. Within the district, the streets are tree-lined and built with sidewalks. Outside the district, street trees are lacking and sidewalks mostly non-existent. Argonne Road is the main street through Millwood, connecting the city with the rest of the Spokane area via highways to the south. As the main street, it is home to the commercial section of the historic district, which runs along the west side of Argonne and wraps around for the first block of Euclid Avenue. The rest of the district is single-family residential in nature. Prior to European settlement, the area that is now the historic district was homeland to the Spokane people. A winter camp for the upper Spokane was recorded in the area. European settlement in the Millwood area began with Antoine Plante, who founded a ferry across the river in 1856 about two miles upstream. M.F. Warren became the first settler to homestead within the borders of the historic district in 1883. Development in the area was spurred on in 1903 when an electric interurban railway connecting Spokane to Coeur d'Alene was routed through Millwood. The community became known as Woodard Junction after the family that provided land for the railway and station. What became known as Argonne Road was established through the area in 1908 to connect the Spokane Valley community of Dishman, Washington, on the south side of the valley opposite Millwood, north to the Spokane River at Millwood.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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