Hill's Yard: The Railroad Town Inside the City

James J. Hill, the railroad baron known as the Empire Builder, did not want to pay city taxes. So when the Great Northern Railway built its Spokane terminal in eighteen ninety-two, Hill placed it northeast of the city limits, on a flat piece of ground that local people almost immediately began calling Hillyard, as in Hill's Yard. Hill reportedly disliked the name. It stuck anyway.

Hillyard grew into its own town, a working-class community built entirely around the rhythms of the railroad. The Great Northern shops there were at their peak the largest locomotive manufacturing and repair facility west of the Mississippi River. The complex included a twenty-stall engine roundhouse and produced some of the most powerful steam engines in the country, including the R One Mallet, a massive articulated locomotive. Between nineteen twenty-seven and nineteen thirty, twenty-six of them were built right here.

At its height, the Great Northern employed more than thirteen hundred people in Hillyard and paid out more than six million dollars annually in wages. Every day, an average of twenty-four hundred freight cars rolled through the terminal. The houses that line North Market Street and the streets surrounding it were built between nineteen oh four and nineteen twelve specifically to house the railroaders and their families. The neighborhood had its own schools, churches, grocery stores, and social clubs, a complete town that happened to sit inside city limits.

The decline followed the pattern familiar to industrial America. Railroads merged. Diesel replaced steam. Hillyard was absorbed into Spokane as the Great Northern consolidated with Burlington Northern in nineteen seventy. The shops closed officially on October fourth, nineteen eighty-two. The broad, largely vacant strip running through the center of the neighborhood today is where the rail yard used to be.