Great Spokane Fire
major fire in Spokane, Washington in 1889
The Great Spokane Fire—known locally as The Great Fire—was a major fire which affected downtown Spokane, Washington (called "Spokane Falls" at the time) on August 4, 1889. It began just after 6:00 p.m. and destroyed the city's downtown commercial district. Due to technical problems with a pump station, there was no water pressure in the city when the fire started. In a desperate bid to starve the fire, firefighters began razing buildings with dynamite. Eventually winds died down and the fire exhausted of its own accord. As a result of the fire and its aftermath, virtually all of Spokane's downtown was destroyed, though only one person was killed.
The cause of the fire was never determined. Theories included a cooking fire in a lunchroom, a curling iron being heated in a kerosene lamp, and a spark from a passing train.
Timeline
The summer of 1889 had been hot and dry.
“Great Spokane Fire” enters the record as major fire in Spokane, Washington in 1889. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Great, Spokane and Fire can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19878399. Authority coordinates are 47.656, -117.425. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Great Spokane Fire” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.