Then and Now: Hawthorne School

Costing approximately $45,000, Hawthorne School was completed and opened in 1899, educating children who lived in downtown Spokane.

School officials had hoped the cavernous attic space would be later finished as a gymnasium, but a 1922 newspaper article shows the school didn’t have an auditorium or gymnasium and that wintertime physical education classes took place in the wide second-floor hallway.

Hawthorne was on a block west and across the street from Spokane High School, built in 1891. In 1906, when North Central High School was added, the Spokane High was renamed South Central. In 1910, a massive fire destroyed the high school and it would take two years to replace it while students double-shifted at North Central. A new brick school, now called Lewis and Clark High School, was completed in 1912.

An update in The Spokesman-Review from 1922 said the school had an average attendance of 650 students from the area south of the Spokane River, up to Ninth Avenue, between Browne and Jefferson streets. That story also noted many boys at Hawthorne often worked after school by running errands, selling newspapers, and assisting in shops and offices, which resulted in fewer students playing competitive sports than in outlying schools.

But by the early 1930s, downtown’s population dwindled as families moved to outlying areas and to new schools. Tight budgets forced the Spokane school board to close Hawthorne in February 1932. The remaining Hawthorne students were reassigned to Lincoln, Irving and Washington elementary schools.

The school board debated what to do with the building, which was being used for storage, and Lewis and Clark’s shop program was moved there.

In 1933, a night school program began at Lewis and Clark High School in topics such as typing, foreign languages, bookkeeping, penmanship, welding and mechanical drawing, with some classes at the Hawthorne building.

The building also housed a jobs program called the Washington Emergency Relief Administration. Workers, mostly women, made rugs, blankets, quilts and mattresses.

The classes and jobs programs would grow into the Spokane Trade School, established in 1940 with a state grant. The classes, mostly for men, focused on carpentry, plumbing, machining and other trades. Nursing was added in 1947.

The Spokane Technical and Vocational School moved to a new campus at 3403 E. Mission Ave. in 1958. The school would become Spokane Community College in 1963.

Old Hawthorne School was torn down in 1966 to make way for the new interstate highway through Spokane.