Tekoa Washington

In 1875, F. P. Connell and his wife, Mary N. Welch and family (considered to be Tekoa's first white settlers) came to the area of what would later become The City of Tekoa, a part of the newly formed Whitman county. A former Union Army soldier in the Civil War, he had traveled to the West by ship via Cape Horn after the War, arriving in Portland, Oregon, where he became a reporter for the Oregonian newspaper, and where he met and married his bride, Mary. Moving east, they came to the Tekoa area and located a farm and trading post to the Native Americans about a mile northeast of the present City of Tekoa. Connell soon became widely known and was well respected by the Native Americans for his help on their behalf. Incidentally, his farm produced the first smoked meat to be shipped into Spokane. The Huffman brothers, George, David and Nathaniel, followed his lead, each establishing a homestead by Hangman Creek, which later were divided into city tracts and formed a part of the current site of modern day Tekoa. As other settlers arrived in the area, this booming settlement was named Fork of the Creek. In 1883, the Truax brothers established a saw mill on the west bank of Hangman Creek. In 1884, John McDonald, a railroad land agent, began buying right of ways for the soon to be coming railroad. Then came the moment when the growing community would receive it's final name. The infant community wanted a Post Office of it's own, and Fork of the Creek just didn't seem suitable to appear on the postal seal. Mrs. Dan Truax, standing on the porch of her house on the west bank of Hangman Creek, looked at the large number of tents in the city, temporary shelters for the railroad workers and others. She suggested to her husband that they accept the counsel of Amos in the Bible and call the community Tekoa, from the Hebrew word meaning "city of tents", which was about all that Tekoa was at the time. And so the name stuck. In time, the tents were replaced by permanent wood frame buildings, and later, because of several fires in town, many wood buildings were replaced by brick ones, some of which stand to this day. The town was finally incorporated as The City of Tekoa on March 30, 1889, S. E. Coffin serving as Chairman of it's Board of Trustees, and therefore as it's first mayor, John Marsh serving as the first town Marshal, and D. W. "Uncle Dan" Truax as its first Police Judge. And the rest, as they say, is history.

THE TEKOA MERCANTILE AND WAREHOUSE

Carrying a load of sacked grain to or from the building, this early "24 hoofer" counterpart of the modern day "18 wheeler" stops out front. An interesting note, many drivers of modern day trucks belong to a union called The Teamsters. A teamster was a man who drove a "team" of horses, like the ones yoked together in this picture.