Reaney Park, Pullman's oldest public park, has served as an important community gathering place and recreation spot for residents since the early 1900s. Throughout its history, the park has hosted community celebrations, from Fourth of July festivities to the city's National Lentil Festival. Pullman voters authorized the city to purchase the land from the Reaneys in 1904; following the purchase, the city invested in the park to expand its amenities, installing a bandstand for concerts and a swimming pool.
The volunteer efforts of the Pullman Civic Trust transformed what had been a neglected riverfront site in 1983 into River Park. It features a check dam, benches, and a storage shed designed by former WSU Architecture Professor Don Heil. The structures were designed to suggest the art and artwork of Pacific Northwest indigenous peoples. The City of Pullman now oversees River Park, and community members annually participate in a spring cleanup. The park parallels the South Fork of the Palouse River and connects with the Bill Chipman Trail.
Fifteen-foot-tall concrete letters reading "WSU" and a steel-plate tower establish the western entrance to the university and serve as highly-visible icons to drivers traveling along State Route 270. Designed by Seattle-based Olson Kundig Architects, visitors will discover a light-filled, modular space that showcases materials developed at the WSU Composite Materials and Engineering Center and interactive displays that celebrate the research accomplishments and entrepreneurial spirit of faculty, students, staff, and alumni. The center's design-build team featured graduates from the WSU School of Design and Construction.
The structure is a memorial to the residents of Pullman who died in World War I, World War II, the Korean Conflict, and the Viet Nam War. It is in the shape of an obelisk around twenty feet high. It has three metal plaques attached to the metal obelisk, the first with an eagle and design along each side with the names of nine dead from World War I and 25 from World War II. The second plaque, which is smaller, has the name of one person who died in Korea. The third plaque, of plain design, has the names of four men who died in Viet Nam. The small memorial grounds include a flag pole flying the national flag.
Built in 1938, this three-story concrete and masonry structure provided a training space for local units of the Washington State National Guard, many of which served overseas. The Armory also has served as a center for community activities in Pullman, hosting everything from music performances, comedy acts, athletic events, and yoga. Its austere, stripped-down, symmetrical facade includes an arched, recessed entryway in the manner of a Romanesque church.
This public space is used for public gatherings and is the location of the city Christmas tree every year.
The Audian Theatre has been part of social fabric of life in Pullman for nearly a century. Built in 1915, this building originally housed Pullman's fifth silent movie house, the Grand Theater. The building was remodeled in 1930, reopening as the Audian Theater in October 1930.
Built in 1930, the Pullman branch of the United States Post Office was designed to be a grand structure. The finest materials, including marble and polished wood, were used in its construction. When a new post office was built in 1975, the old post office converted to other uses. Today it houses Paradise Creek Brewery and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Russell Hotel, now known as the Moose Lodge, was constructed in 1916. Dr. Charles H. Russell (born ca. 1863) decided to enlarge his medical office at this site to meet the needs of an expanding practice. The project grew to two stories by 1916 and was converted to a place of lodging in 1919. While not as grandiose as the nearby Hotel Pullman (built 1893, dismantled 1918); Artesian Hotel (built 1893, burned 1922) or the Washington Hotel (built 1927, demolished 1972), the Russell Hotel is nonetheless the oldest surviving reminder of Pullman's long-standing tradition in visitor accommodations. The building offered lodging until 1947, when it became the Moose Lodge.
The current building is set on the footprint of a single-story structure that was built in ca. 1890 and housed one of the first banks in Pullman in ca. 1910. The fenestration, entries, storefronts, and overall scale haven't changed, though the building has been extensively renovated.
This building was constructed in ca. 1895 for Dr. Henry J. Webb following the fire of 1890 and-similar to the Mason and Flatiron buildings in the vicinity-represents the historic brick core of Pullman's established downtown in the late nineteenth century. The Webb Block once housed the offices of the Pullman Herald and was a fixture in the early foundation of Pullman. In the last decades of the twentieth century, the building was rechristened as the Combine Mall, the source of still-visible advertising on the structure's west side.
The triangular shape of this 1905 brick building resembles the Flatiron Building in New York City. Pullman's version, a load-bearing masonry structure designed by the local architect William Swain, fans out to meet two street grids overlapping in the city center. The prow of the building, on the southeast comer of Main Street and Grand Avenue, has provided a notable gateway to downtown Pullman for more than a century.
An excellent example of the buildings comprising the early brick-faced commercial core of downtown Pullman, this three-story building is one of a handful of structures that emerged in the wake of the 1890 Pullman fire. Erected in 1892, it followed a new municipal ordinance requiring brick construction for all new downtown buildings. The detailed brickwork suggests pride in the late nineteenth century building of Pullman's downtown.
Erected in 1927 as a theater showing silent films, by August 1929 the Cordova became the first venue in Pullman to show "talkies." Common to early movie theaters whose designs attempted to catapult theatergoers into worlds of fantasy, the Spanish Eclectic exterior and the opulent interior, with its decorative ticket booth, linked Pullman to national design trends. In 1950, the current marquee was attached to the facade, obscuring the original design but in keeping with contemporary advertising styles. The marquee has been a fixture in downtown Pullman now for more than 60 years, and movies are still occasionally shown here.
The current building for Neill Public Library was completed in 1992 on a site that the city's library has occupied since 1962. The library completed a substantial addition in 2004. The origins of the city's library are in a children's summer library established by the local chapter of the American Association of University Women in 1922. It soon became a year-around facility with books for all ages and by 1940 it was fully operated by the City of Pullman. The library moved to various locations and buildings in the city until it settled into its current building.
Restaurants have occupied this space in recent years, but for much of the twentieth century this building, with its Mission Revival features, housed a photography studio that documented the change and growth of Pullman. Built in 1926 by James Carson for the Artopho photography company, the building was best known as the Hutchison Studio following its 1927 purchase by Raymond Hutchison. The studio also was Pullman's principal location for portrait photography, and Hutchison himself once served as the official yearbook photographer of Washington State College.
Near this site on May 24, 1889, contractors digging a downtown well discovered a confined natural aquifer beneath Pullman's rich soil. City officials quickly tapped into the pressurized groundwater, forcing several artesian wells to the surface and providing Pullman with a clean, reliable source of water. These wells were the city's main source of water until the 1970s when the groundwater was depleted. The fountain on Kamiaken Street is in honor of the wells' important role in the history of Pullman.
This steel Pratt through-truss bridge serves as a physical symbol of Pullman's regional, national, and global reach. For many years, it has spanned the occasionally volatile South Fork of the Palouse River and has provided vital support for trains hauling agricultural products and passengers. The bridge suffered significant damage during the 1910 flood, but was reconfigured to ensure protection against future water events. It is still in use and located on private property.
In June 1916, the Northern Pacific Railroad replaced a smaller wooden structure with a distinguished passenger depot befitting the first transcontinental railroad to span the Pacific Northwest. The new station featured wrought iron grillwork, gabled parapets, brass fittings, oak furniture, and marble restrooms-some of which are still visible in the reconfigured lobby. During the first half of the twentieth century, the "Cougar Special" train departed from the depot and brought Washington State College students to and from Seattle. The Whitman County Historical Society purchased the property in 2018 and formed the Pullman Depot Heritage Center.
Once known as the Star Route, the red brick portions of Maple Street and Palouse Streets are the remains of an old postal route. In the early 1910s, the Pullman Chamber of Commerce voted to pave the roads leading to the Washington State campus. Brick was chosen on streets with a steeper incline to give horses more traction. The remaining brick road is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The United Presbyterian Church, more commonly known as the Greystone Church, was built in 1898 by famed Pullman architect William Swain. The church was enlarged in 1914 and continued to serve the community until 1977. The building now houses apartments which are primarily used by college students.
Downtown Pullman's tallest structure, this 75-foot concrete grain silo, built in 1954 for the Pullman Grain Growers, is a physical reminder of the region's principal crop: wheat. The ability to cultivate wheat on the rolling hills of the surrounding Palouse has been vital to the economic development of Pullman for more than a century, and since 1978, Whitman County has been the largest wheat-producing county in United States. Just down Grand Avenue from the silo is the Dumas Seed Warehouse. In the early 1960s, the visionary legume grower Edwin A. Dumas (1910-1978) purchased a prefabricated building from the Butler Manufacturing Company in Galesburg, Illinois, and had it shipped, by rail, to Pullman for the storage of locally-grown peas and lentils. Dumas earned international fame in the 1960s for initiating the sale of dry pea products from Pullman to Japan, and his pioneering work helped area farmers recognize that legumes could be used as rotation crops by restoring the nitrogen stripped from the soil by grains. Inside the building, some of the machinery once employed in the pea-storing process still remains.
Passenger demand and a rising local population inspired the Union Pacific Railroad, in 1938, to rebuild an existing station to compete with the nearby Northern Pacific Railroad Depot. This new brick depot replaced an older nineteenth century wooden structure, built originally for the Oregon Railway and Navigation Company, and was in keeping with a variety of brick edifices that had risen both in downtown Pullman and at Washington State College earlier in the twentieth century. Now out of service as a depot, the Union Pacific logo still graces the north facade of the renovated structure. Original wooden beams are still clearly visible inside.
This Tour is a Walking Tour.
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This slightly longer walking tour offers stops at nearly two dozen buildings, monuments, and other landmarks that collectively tell the story of Pullman. The tour begins at the Union Pacific Depot and concludes with stops at River Park and Reaney Park. Be sure to also explore some of the other walking tours in Pullman as well as individual Clio entries for nearby museums and historic sites.
