Millwood Daze

The day begins with pancakes at the Millwood Community Center. At the 2024 Millwood Daze, held Saturday, August 24, the Hutton Settlement cooked the breakfast from 9:00 to 11:00 in the morning: pancakes and sausages or biscuits and gravy, with juice and coffee, for $8.00 a plate for adults and $5.00 for children. The proceeds were to fund “Community Mills” at the center that fall. In 2026 the runners went first. The Millwood Daze 5K started at 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, August 22, 2026, from a tree-lined start in the historic district, on what its race page calls a flat, fast loop for runners and walkers. Registration included a free breakfast. The page pitched the race to middle and high school cross-country runners as a fast 5K two days before team practice begins.

From the breakfast the crowd moves to Dalton Boulevard, which fills with vendors from the Millwood Farmers’ Market and from local businesses, each expected to host an activity for children. The Millwood Community Association runs the event. After 2024 it thanked Millwood Grocery & Spirits, the Corner Door, Stockwells, The Rocket, the Old Mill Tavern, Joe’s House, Whistlepunk Brewing, the Masonic Lodge and the Inland Empire Paper Co., among others. A Franz Bakery truck handed out donuts, grilled cheese and cookies. “You made 8/24/24 a very Great Daze!” the association wrote.

Valve covers at Bottles

The car show is presented by The Male Room, and Oh My Vintage supplied its 2024 awards. That year the show added Spokane Car Show Bingo. A card came with each car registration and cost guests $2.00, and the first three completed cards won gift baskets. Stockwells Grill N’ Chill served a special lunch menu to car show entrants and its standard menu to everyone else.

Smaller cars race at Bottles, which advertised a family day from noon to 5 p.m. in 2024. Each racer must be made from an actual valve cover, with no engine, no propulsive additions and no moving weights. Wheels of any material may be attached any way, so long as they do not extend beyond the front of the cover. A car may be no longer than 30 inches, no wider than 10.5 and no taller than 11. Its front “bumper” may be no taller than 3 inches so the starting gate can hold it in place. The weight limit is 10 pounds. An overweight car may still race but cannot win the overall title. Pre-race registration opens at noon, practice runs begin at 1:00, and qualifying races begin at 2:00. Designs, the rules state, should be “appropriate for all audiences.”

Wagons down Dalton and a drama of Daniel

At noon in 2024 the Wheels Parade started on Dalton near the Corner Door. It took bicycles, scooters, wagons, buggies, roller skates and anything else on wheels, with riders and rides dressed to the theme “Best of the 1960.” Kendra Smith of Farmers Insurance sponsored the parade. A Spokesman-Review photograph from 2013 shows children and their families decorating red wagons for it.

Millwood Community Presbyterian Church opened from 10:00 to 2:00 that day with a Jerusalem Marketplace, and it also provided the festival’s restrooms. Inside, families visited a carpenter shop, explored traditional family life and watched a Bible drama. Outside stood Babylon, with a small marketplace, a mini food court and a drama telling the story of Daniel. The sanctuary held “Fruit of the Spirit” Ministries and Music.

The 2024 festival had opened the night before. On Friday, August 23, Disney’s Herbie the Love Bug played at Millwood Park at dusk, 8:45, for an audience asked to bring its own chairs.

After the road work on Argonne

The program changes from year to year. The Spokesman-Review’s preview of the 2019 Daze describes a country breakfast hosted by the Magnolia Chapter of the Masonic Lodge, with pancakes, French toast, biscuits and gravy, sausage and eggs. “It’s a hearty breakfast,” said organizer Shireen Young. “It’s a good deal.”

That year Millwood Grocery and Spirits gave away ice until 4 p.m., the Corner Door sold ice cream cones for $1.50, and Millwood Brewery offered its own root beer and cream soda. The street fair and car show ran from noon to 7 p.m. on Dalton Avenue between Argonne and Marguerite Road, with food trucks. The children’s parade left at 12:15 with the theme “your favorite animal.” Dusty Wetzler and LiteFeet led live music and country dancing until 8. The Pug Club brought dogs for petting, “or the pug kisses you,” Young said. The 5K became a sunset run that left the fair at 6 p.m. for Felts Field and back. “We went to sunset this time because no one else is doing it,” Young said. The movie, Madagascar, showed behind the Rocket Bakery at dusk. It was also the first year the street fair started late, to make room for morning events such as the Liberty Lake Farmers Market.

Young said the festival had started eleven years before, as a way to bring people back to Millwood businesses after lengthy road work on Argonne Road was finished. “Really the whole thing is to celebrate Millwood,” she said. “We’re trying to get people to walk around Millwood.”

Woodard Station and the paper mill

For centuries the Upper Spokane Indians wintered beside the Spokane River here, on land the paper mill later occupied. The district’s National Register nomination records that the swift river, fed by the aquifer beneath it, virtually never froze. Salmon dried on racks, and bunch grass on the valley floor fed horses through the winter. The camp had sweat lodges and a race track.

In 1903 the Coeur d’Alene-Spokane Railroad Co. planned an electric line through the valley. Seth Woodard and his father, Joseph, offered free right of way through their land. According to the nomination, Seth then took a notary public down the rest of the proposed route and signed up willing landowners on the spot. The railroad put Woodard Station on Seth’s land near present Argonne Road. A road was laid through the station in 1908, and a steel bridge crossed the river in 1909. In 1920 a new concrete bridge was dedicated to the memory of the World War I battle of the Argonne Woods, and the road took the name Argonne.

W.A. Brazeau persuaded the Nekoosa-Edwards Paper Co. of Appleton, Wisconsin, to build a mill at the station. A local history site places that in 1909; the nomination says 1910. The mill began producing paper in September 1911. Its management wanted a town name that would promote the mill and chose Millwood, for the mill and for the Woodards. By 1911 the town had a lumberyard, a restaurant, a barbershop, a general store and the Wiley Hotel.

Mill workers and their families came from the Midwest to an area with little housing. In 1923 the company set up a revolving home loan fund, offered lots for sale and gave employees books of house plans. Waldo Rosebush was general manager from 1921 until 1936, the years when most of the district was built. He was a military man, historian, firearms inventor and supporter of community band music. The nomination calls his house and garage the most imaginative in the district. Close to half of the district’s buildings were built of clay tile masonry. On incorporation the sources differ. The local history site says Millwood became the first incorporated town in the Spokane Valley in 1928. The Spokesman-Review gave 1927 and reported in 2000 that Millwood had been the valley’s only city until Liberty Lake residents voted to incorporate.

A nomination from the Corner Door

In 2000 the Corner Door Cafe on Argonne Road was co-owned by Bobbie Beese, who prepared the district’s National Register nomination. She and her brother, Greg Mott, had begun researching Millwood’s history in 1993 and wrote a walking tour booklet. In late November 2000 the Washington State Advisory Council on Historic Preservation added Millwood to the Washington Heritage Register and recommended it for the National Register. Nancy Compau, a Spokane historian on the council, said the vote was unanimous and called Beese’s work “a labor of love.” “It removes any doubt that it is an important historical resource in the Valley and gives it credibility,” Beese said.

The district covers eight blocks bounded by Liberty, Euclid, Argonne and Sargent and was listed in 2001. A local history page recorded in 2007 that the Inland Empire Paper Co. still made paper in the center of town. Its name appeared on the thank-you list after the 2024 Daze.