1934 Honorary Member Profile : "Uncle" Sam Glasgow

Samuel Glasgow's affectionate club name, "Uncle Sam," gives little clue of his status as a pioneer businessman, civic leader, world traveler, and historian.

Though a member for only 13-1/2 years by 1934, when he merited the Mountaineers fifth honorary title, he came to Spokane, then a mere village, in 1882, when he was 23. In 1889, he co-founded Centennial Flouring Mills and served as secretary-treasurer and manager for the home office of the company, which, with 11 mills outside Spokane, soon became the largest in Washington, marketing its product in Alaska, Mexico, Russia, South and Central America, and the Orient. He later co-owned the Nash Motor Car Company in Spokane.

Spokane's great fire of August 4, 1889, had a silver lining for the new flour mill. The first 100 barrels of flour had been produced on August 3, just one day before the fire, and because post-fire provisions were short, the mill donated the flour to almost 700 families. "It was a wonderful advertisement for us and put us on the map at once," Glasgow said in his typewritten memoirs. (The Centennial mill in Spokane burned and was rebuilt twice in those early years.)

As a city commissioner (1915), Glasgow's bailiwick was public affairs: health, sanitation, weights and measures, the isolation hospital, public market, labor bureau, dental clinic, and charities. He served on President Hoover's U.S. Food Administration during World War I, and in 1941, he was given the title of "Honorary Mayor" during a Senior Citizen week. He was also an early president of the Spokane County Pioneers Association in the 1930's, and with a colleague, searched out potential sites for historical markers, such as "Horse Slaughter Camp," La Plante's ferry landing, the "Hanging Tree," and the intersection of the Mullan Trail with the Inland Empire Highway. Travel for both business and pleasure took Glasgow to much of Asia and Europe and all U.S. states except Maine. He journeyed up and down the Pacific coast by rail, auto, and steamship many times.

Despite deteriorating eyesight caused by cataracts, which led to the sale of his interest in Centennial Mills in 1913, Glasgow was an avid Mountaineer. He joined in June 1921, at the age of 63, and 3 months later was leading 26 hikers on walk 210, a 12-mile jaunt from the train stop at Millwood north to Pleasant Prairie and back. He served as club vice-president, historian, and chairman of the summer outing, lodge site selection, and educational committees. He organized public presentations, often at the Old National Bank, on topics such as "forest fire control" and "geology of the Inland Empire."

In 1926, Glasgow purchased, for $80,000, the 800-acre Belwood grain and stock ranch near Valleyford. Generous with invitations to the ranch, often for Halloween, he earned club bulletin accolades. The October 1926 Halloween party and barn dance were dubbed, "The most important affair on the club's social calendar." Seventy Mountaineers danced by lantern-light in the large loft and bedded down "in the comfortable barns with fragrant hay serving as downy beds....Immediately after 12...the bugler sounded Taps." Chariot and marshmallow races, ball games, horseback riding, and more followed on Sunday. Uncle Sam traditionally led the annual "beefsteak hike." In 1923, for example, 43 Mountaineers followed him to the Commissary Committee's "thick, juicy and tender" steaks on a 12 miler. He was also a regular as Santa Claus for the then-yearly Christmas Tree walks.

In 1932, the club named one of five Siberian elm trees sponsored on the Road of Remembrance, the new double-track, paved northern approach to the city, in Glasgow's honor.

Self-described "wanderlust in my blood," plus a cousin's California Gold Rush tale, lured Glasgow west from a LaPorte County, Indiana, farm childhood with 10 siblings where"rounding up the stragglers" for his Scottish father's large herd was an early joy. Twenty-one years after his birth in 1858, Glasgow quit school and, following a brother's lead, bought a ticket for Council Bluffs, Iowa, to work in a railroad freight department. He worked briefly for an Avoca, Iowa, flour mill, whose owner became another co-founder of Centennial Mills. (Apparently always popular in the business community, Glasgow also persuaded a Nebraska implement dealer and several other Midwesterners to join them.)

Pooling their limited dollars, Glasgow's brother headed for San Francisco. Sam soon followed, economizing with a 12-day "emigrant car" train ride. He took along a blanket for warmth in the tourist cars that regularly pulled onto sidings so higher-priority traffic could pass. Finding no jobs in San Francisco, he took the ocean steamer Oregon to Portland, where work was also nil. So it was on to Spokane via steamer to the Columbia's Celilo Falls, railroad portage, another steamer to Willows, a train to the junction of the Snake and Columbia rivers, a ferry to Pasco, another train to Cheney (then the Spokane county seat), and a stage to Medical Lake, where his brother had settled. In Spokane, Glasgow first worked as a hardware store clerk and later a clerk and bookkeeper the Clark and Curtis flour mill. In 1884, he joined the "sooners" rush for gold on Idaho's Pritchard and Eagle creeks.

Family life began in 1887 with his marriage to Mary Jane McLeod, formerly of San Francisco. They lived with their daughter, Ethel L., at the Westminster Hotel in Browne's Addition and later moved to E. 320 Pacific, where, at 57, Mary Jane died in 1922 after 4 years of influenza-induced illness.

Glasgow's prominence in the community was evident when, in 1934, newspaper headlines declared "Samuel Glasgow Regains Eyesight!" A successful cataract operation gave him "almost complete" vision in his final years. Always active in a variety of fraternal organizations and an original member of the Spokane Chamber of Commerce, Glasgow was still a regular at Chamber meetings and visited the Elks temple almost daily until, following a long illness, his death in March 1945. At that time, he was living with a sister in the Carlyle Hotel.

The Kinnikinnick noted that "He did a great deal for the club....It is with regret that we chronicle his death, but perhaps he has only gone on ahead, and is scouting out other trails for us to follow, one by one...." A mystery remains: At the club's 10th anniversary, the October 1925 bulletin states that, "Uncle Sam gave us the secret of why he is called 'Uncle.'" However, it left no record of the reason.

Lorna Ream

Sources: Spokane Mountaineer bulletins, Eastern Washington State Historical Society archives, Spokane Public Library's Northwest Collection, the Spokesman-Review, the Spokane Chronicle, N.W. Durham's History of the City of Spokane and Spokane County, Jonathan Edwards' History of Spokane County, and Florence E. Sherfey's Spokane County Gristmills.