Then and Now: John W. Graham and Co.

John W. Graham, born 1860 in Rockport, Indiana, knew how to sell.

He delivered newspapers, sold apples on the street with his brother James and helped his dad trade farm animals up and down the Ohio River. At the age of 10, he set up a little table in a general store where he sold tablets, ink and writing paper.

While working in a Minneapolis stationery store in 1887, he read about a promising Western boomtown in the Washington territory. He stepped off the train in Spokane in 1888. The rustic town didn’t appeal to him, so he decided to hop back on the evening train and go to Seattle. But he had dropped two shirts at a Chinese laundry and he had to stay until the next day to get them back. The delay changed his mind and he took a job in the stationery shop of Sylvester Heath. Within a year, Heath’s shop was burned to the ground in Spokane’s great fire in August of 1889. Heath decided not to rebuild, so Graham set up a tent on the ashes of Heath’s store and went into business.

For the next 80 years, John W. Graham and Co. was Spokane’s place to buy books, magazines, stationery, art and office supplies, cameras and film, paint, wallpaper, furniture and gifts. Graham’s slogan was “If it’s made of paper, we have it.”

Graham’s store was first located in the Great Eastern Building until it was destroyed by fire in 1898.

The next location, on the 700 block of West Sprague Avenue, extending to First Avenue on the building’s upper floors, was the store’s most enduring location.

Historian Carolyn Hage Nunemaker, in her book of Spokane photographs from the 1930s and 1940s, said Graham’s was five stories of open showrooms and interesting nooks and crannies. “A stranger wandering in might have gotten lost in the peculiar arrangement, but those of us who knew its secrets felt comfortably familiar there,” she wrote.

The basement held American flags, party favors and decorations. As a child, Nunemaker loved the toys, puzzles, stickers and paper dolls. For many years, Graham’s had the largest toy department in Spokane.

John Graham died of a heart attack in June 1941 at the age of 81. A group of his employees bought the business from his estate in 1951. The business stayed in the old building until 1973, when the structure was torn down to make way for the Washington Trust Bank building. The store moved to a smaller location at Riverside Avenue and Stevens Street for a few years, and was bought out by Portland-based bookseller J.K. Gill Co. around 1980.

– Jesse Tinsley