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As ‘Spokane’s Inland Seashore,’ Liberty Lake once attracted thousands of tourists
5/26/2010 8:53:29 AM

By Josh Johnson
Splash Staff Writer

It started with a bicycling craze, gained steam riding a train and slowly decelerated thanks in part to the automobile. But during a sweet spot of time in the early 1900s, Liberty Lake regularly drew crowds in the thousands as a premier resort destination for residents of the Spokane area.

Particularly in the summers and on weekends, Liberty Lake lived up to its nickname as "Spokane's Inland Seashore." According to "Memories of Liberty Lake," a 1951 booklet written by Mildred Brereton and Evelyn Foedish, a crowd of 14,000 showed up for the Fourth of July in 1924. A 2001 documentary on the community's history, "Liberty Lake: Spokane's Inland Seashore," listed the 1939 All-Valley Picnic at Liberty Lake Park as "breaking all records" with nearly 20,000 people in attendance. Both the booklet and film are major sources for this story.

The bicycles
In the late 1800s, there was little sign of the tourist magnet Liberty Lake would soon become. A handful of families homesteaded the community. One of them was a young cattleman named Roderick MacKenzie, who purchased 1,200 acres of lake property in 1889. About this time, bicycling was gaining popularity in Spokane, and cyclists began to take day rides out to Liberty Lake.

"Some of them would wade in the lake or ask to borrow a boat," said Ross Schneidmiller, a lifetime Liberty Lake resident and community historian. "Specifically with the MacKenzies, they were already feeding people who showed up at the lake, and they decided to do 35-cents-a-plate chicken dinners. From that, they built a hotel."

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The 20-room MacKenzie Hotel was located on the west side of the lake in today's Wicomico area. Schneidmiller said while people like the MacKenzies and E.E. Ernst, who developed Dreamwood Bay resort, almost started their destination businesses by accident, it wasn't long before entrepreneurs were coming to Liberty Lake with the idea of building resort businesses.

"After the turn of the century, you had individuals purchasing land with the direct intent of developing them into a summer resort," he said, listing people like Daniel and Louisa Neyland (Neyland's Grove) and Charles Traeger (Zephyr Inn) as examples.

The trains
By 1903, an electric railroad ran between Spokane and Coeur d'Alene, passing within two miles of Liberty Lake. In 1907, a spur line was completed that brought rail to the lake. As was typical at the time, railroads would build resorts at the end of their "trolley lines" to entice passengers to the destinations, Schneidmiller said. To this end, the railroad developed 32-acre Liberty Lake Park in 1908 and 1909 (when the dance pavilion extending out onto the lake - that was so much of Pavillion Park's heritage - was completed). The development included the planting of 2,000 trees and sculpting the landscape in the area now known as the Alpine Shores neighborhood.

"What really put Liberty Lake on the map, what made it unique from the other lakes in the area, was when the electric railway linked to the resort out here," Schneidmiller said. "It basically became one of two recreational destinations for the whole Spokane area - Liberty Lake Park being one and Natatorium Park being the other."

Schneidmiller listed two trends of the time that made Liberty Lake a sought-after destination: motor boating and wading.

"At the time, the whole concept of watersports was in its infancy," he said. "And in our area particularly, there were not many good roads to outlying areas or some of the bigger lakes. The other lakes were not very accessible."

While the train gave Liberty Lake a leg up in that area, the lake's traditionally warmer waters and shallow depth made it a wonderful wading destination. Liberty Lake Park rented swimming suits and boasted a 300-room bathhouse. Extending beyond the park, Schneidmiller noted that the expanse of sandy beach also was a draw.

"When you consider that you could go from the end of Lilac Lane all the way over to Sandy Beach and basically have one unencumbered beach area, compare that to Coeur d'Alene or Sandpoint where people think the city beaches are so large today," Schneidmiller said. "(Liberty Lake's beach area was) considerably larger."

Schneidmiller said Liberty Lake's heyday extended through the 1920s, and by the mid-teens it was "hitting full stride."

"In 1914, the railroad traffic from Spokane to Liberty Lake was so busy that they doubled the lines between Spokane and Greenacres to accommodate for the Liberty Lake traffic," he said.

At the peak, the electric rail ran 22 trains a day to Liberty Lake on weekends.

The automobiles
The ability of the automobile to help residents explore the region's other recreational amenities coupled with the Great Depression began to spell the end of Liberty Lake's days as a tourist destination. Personal transportation also made it more feasible for Liberty Lake to see private development on the lake, and by the middle of the century, the community began to see an influx of year-round residents.

"If you look at Spokane's history, they thought the population was going to double from 1910 to 1920, and it pretty much was stagnant until 1950," Schneidmiller said. "Basically after World War II, when the Spokane area became more populated, that's when Liberty Lake started to change."

Private waterfront and secondary lots transformed the community. The dance pavilion on the lake, damaged by fire a couple of years prior, was torn down in 1962 after the closing of Liberty Lake Park. Sig's Resort, also on the west side of the lake, operated until 1971. The last resort to close was Sandy Beach, on the northeast shore, in 1991.

"Liberty Lake became a bedroom community to Spokane," Schneidmiller said. "It was really a 30- to 40-year process."