Archives West Finding Aid

The principal members of the Tannatt family were Thomas Redding Tannatt (1853-1913), Elizabeth Tappan Tannatt (b. 1837), Eben Tappan Tannatt (1864-1952), and Miriam (Minnie) Tannatt (b. 1866).

Thomas R. Tannatt graduated from the United States Military Academy in 1858 and rose to the rank of Brevet-General in the United States Army in 1864. A civil engineer by profession, Tannatt was the manager of several Colorado mines in the years after the Civil War, but was unable to continue strenuous activities because of a war disability. He returned to the East and became associated with the Henry Villard financial and railroad interests. As the manager of the Villard-owned Oregon Improvement Company, Tannatt located in Walla Walla in the later 1870's, where he managed the moves which blocked the extension of the Northern Pacific to the Pacific Coast. He was also the general land agent for development of railroad lands of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Co. Tannatt was mayor of Walla Walla for two terms in the early 1880s and was a contender for appointment as Territorial Governor in 1885. Recurring health problems forced Tannatt into semi-retirement in 1887 and he moved to Farmington, Washington, a town he had earlier platted. There he was an orchardist, land developer, hardware merchant (with a store at Palouse) and silent partner in a brick works in Spokane. He was also a Regent of Washington State University from 1893-1901.

T. R. Tannatt's wife, Elizabeth Tappan Tannatt, attended Charleston Female Academy in Boston during the 1850s. She followed her husband to Dakota Territory in 1859 and around the Kentucky and Virginia battlefields of the Civil War. Later in Washington State she became active in women's suffrage and temperance movements. She was an active figure in the Spokane Daughters of the American Revolution and lead its efforts to place a monument marking the Steptoe expedition of 1858.

General Tannatt's son, Eben Tappan Tannatt, studied engineering briefly in the early 1880s at the University of Illinois and then went west to be associated with his father's land development interests. He returned to engineering school in the 1890s at Washington State University (then, Washington Agriculture College) and was a member of the second graduating class. He was an officer in a Volunteer Engineer Company in the Spanish-American War and mustered out at Hawaii. There he worked for several years as a civil engineer on irrigation and street railroad projects. He returned to the continental United States in 1905 and took a teaching position at Montana State University at Missoula, which he shortly left to become a consulting engineer and civil works contractor.

E. Tappan Tannatt's sister Miriam attended Whitman College Academy and held a variety of positions, one of which was as a librarian at Washington State University in the later 1890s. She married Dr. Cyrus Merriam in 1905 in Spokane.