Spencer, Washington was hardly ever a town. The name may have been around since the 1880s, but the Post Office was only there from 1911 to 1918. A hotel was also there at the time and probably lasted into the late 20s or early 30s.

Not much seems to be remembered about Spencer.

But for some reason, this lost ghost town (all buildings and traces of the place are gone), has captivated me. I’ve spend hours pouring over old maps, searching for references to it and trying my best to figure out not only what it was but exactly where it was.

Spencer is somewhere in Moses Coulee, a canyon along US Route 2, about 20 miles east of Waterville in central Washington. No rail service ever graced this town. There was never a service station (that we know of) or a place to grab a bite to eat. But there was a post office and a hotel.

Yesterday, we set about to find them.

We met up with Dave (a fellow roadie from the American Road Magazine forums) who is also fairly obsessed with Spencer. After a tour of Douglas County’s fine museum and a fairly fruitless attempt at finding out more about the town (nobody seems to remember this place at all!), we all head out to the site.

Calder, Sarah, Dave and I tramped across the sage brush, trying to follow a road that has completely disappeared. A slightly later alignment of the Sunset Highway/Yellowstone Trail/US 2 is very accessible and open to traffic, but this old segment where Spencer lived is completely gone. Even traces of the road were impossible to find.

Thankfully Dave had programmed the plot points that he got from a small bit of map work that I did into his GPS. We followed that, even though we were pretty convinced we found a site. It had some oddly placed rocks and an old tree limb that Calder found (there are no trees out here – so that was suspicious).

The site turned out to be something (but impossible to say what). Still, we headed north, staying about .2 miles east of Jameson Lake Road and about double that distance north of US 2.

Looking at the 1915 map, I tried to line up the telephone poles and thought that we should head farther north. We pushed on, moving past where we thought it was.

Calder and Dave found a bit of metal from a can and I scurried off to find Sarah who found a clearing with no sage brush in it. Sarah’s find turned out to probably just be a clearing (though why it was clear, I don’t know). However, Dave found the motherload and we rushed back to check it out.

Dave’s find proved to us that he had found the site. He picked up a bit of glazed ceramic China which read “HOTEL” on in. This was it. It had to be.

Around Dave’s discovery (which I stupidly neglected to photograph!!), we spread out and found bits of glass, more china, tea pot handles, cold cream jars, medicine bottles and other various man-made things.

As we moved north (the debris field seemed to spread north), Sarah found an object that gave us a date! She picked up a piece of metal and said “is this a license plate?” Sure enough it was! Way to go, Smartz!

She had found a plate from 1916. That’s impressive. What a lucky find! This was now definitely the place. We also found an insulator from a telephone wire, which proves that there was electricity here and that we had found not only the hotel, but the road (and probably the post office, which was right across the road from the hotel).

This made all the hours of research worth it. I can’t believe we actually discovered an old town site. It may seem like a trifling and silly matter to most, but for Dave and me (Sarah and Calder too – they grew to share my obsession, especially when we started to find stuff) this was a very good day.

After the find, Dave had to head back, so Sarah, Calder and I did some more exploring of the Moses Coulee area and visited Dry Falls.

As soon as I get the exact coordinates from Dave, I’ll post them. I don’t expect a rush of tourists to take a pilgrimage to the old Spencer site, but if they wanted to, now they can.

I’d like to make some sort of small marker to indicate what’s there. I’d also like to find some old photographs of Spencer. I’d be willing to bet that they exist, if only we knew of some historical society that could help us out with that….

You can check out all of my pictures here.

*Edit – One thing I neglected to mention was how Spencer got its name. Nobody really seems to know. The person who runs the Douglas County Historical Society did a project on place names in Douglas County, but failed to come up with anything for Spencer. According to her research, nobody named Spencer lived there or owned properly there.

However, I came across a P.K. Spencer who ran for two county offices in 1888. He lost the election for Prosecuting Attorney (receiving only one vote), but won the race for Joint Representative (253 to 207). This info can be found here.

Now, exactly who P.K. was and what happened to him is anybody’s guess. I’m not even sure that Spencer was named after him. But it’s the only lead we’ve come across.

Related posts:

1. The ghost town of Alvira, Pennsylvania
2. 2 tunnels + 1 ghost town = long fun day
3. A day to find the Yellowstone Trail in Washington
4. New Hare Krishna Temple Opens Way the Hell Outside Town
5. Washington doesn’t seem to care about its history