Millwood: The Paper Mill Town That Became Its Own City
Near Spokane, Washington
In the early nineteen hundreds, the Inland Empire Paper Company built a mill on the Spokane River east of the city and needed a town for its workers. The company wanted to call the place Milltown, but the Woodard family, who had owned the land, proposed a compromise: Millwood. Within a year there were two hotels, a restaurant, a barbershop, a general store, and a lumber mill.
The paper company helped employees build their own houses. The result is a compact neighborhood of Craftsman bungalows that workers owned rather than rented, giving the town a stability unusual for company settlements. Millwood incorporated in nineteen twenty-seven as a town, was reclassified as a city in two thousand eight, and remains a small municipality entirely surrounded by Spokane. The Millwood Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, preserves buildings from that founding era of paper-mill prosperity.
Argonne Road, which runs through it, is the only automobile crossing of the Spokane River between Greene Street in Spokane and Trent Avenue, and the Argonne exit of Interstate Ninety is about half a mile south. The city covers only about seven tenths of a square mile and counted one thousand eight hundred eighty-one residents in twenty twenty. In the town center, the Rosebush House is on the National Register as one of Millwood's best preserved homes.
