Once known as the
Hillyard Fire and Rail Museum, it seems now to be referred to simply as the
Hillyard Heritage Museum. Along the old Great Northern tracks on the eastern edge of Hillyard, it is an outdoor museum with indoor displays of railroad and firefighting memorabilia. To date the museum consists of two boxcars, a 1942 Pullman Sleeper Car, a really cool old and tiny diesel switching engine, an ex Great Northern caboose, X 176, and a LaFrance Pumper, circa 1960. The LaFrance doesn't seem to be on display as yet, probably awaiting restoration. There is mention that they also have, stashed away somewhere, a 1959 Pirsch fire engine.
The inside displays are within the caboose and the box cars, consisting of whatever odds and sods the museum has managed to salvage from the extinct railway and the equally extinct Hillyard Fire Department. The museum is operated by the
Hillyard Heritage Museum Society, which was established in 2004, its goal to "
collect and preserve information and artifacts of historic significance". The museum itself was established in 1995 by the Spokane Fire Station Museum.
The museum has managed to garner a bit of free publicity with the publication of a news story in the Spokane Spokesman-Review back in 2009. A bit of that article can be read below.
Showing off Hillyard history
Museum planners strive to save rail memories
The Hillyard Fire and Rail Museum is in a red caboose and two boxcars on specially built tracks at Queen and Green streets. This collection of railroad and fire memorabilia is the brainchild of retired deputy fire marshal Tom Heckler.
In addition, in 2004 the Hillyard Heritage Museum Society was established by neighborhood advocates Mike and Marjorie Brewer. Their goal is to collect and preserve information and artifacts of historic significance. The group is raising funds to build a museum on property near the rail cars. The two independent organizations have a common goal: ensuring Hillyard’s past is not forgotten.
Hillyard history is inextricably tied to the Great Northern Railroad. Established in 1892, the town grew up around the rail yards and was named after railroad magnate Jim Hill. In the Fire and Rail Museum caboose, a large, double-panel, sepia-tinted photo shows the scope of the railroad’s presence. “The yards stretched all the way from Wellesley north to Francis,” Heckler said. “In its prime, the railroad employed 6,000 workers.”...
...Other exhibits include a carpenter’s wooden toolbox, signs from Hillyard businesses and many photos.
The boxcars contain Heckler’s collection of fire memorabilia, including two antique fire extinguishers on wheels that were used in the rail yards. “Hillyard had its own fire department until it was annexed (to Spokane) in 1924,” he said.
Read on at the Spokane Spokesman-Review