Despite this catastrophe, and in part because of it, Spokane experienced a building boom. The downtown was rebuilt, and the city was reincorporated under the present name of "Spokane" in 1891. According to historian David H. Stratton, "From the late 1890s to about 1912, a great flurry of construction created a modern urban profile of office buildings, banks, department stores, hotels and other commercial institutions" which stretched from the Spokane River to the site of the Northern Pacific railroad tracks below the South Hill. Yet the rebuilding and development of the city was far from smooth: between 1889 and 1896 alone, all six bridges over the Spokane River were destroyed by floods before their completion. In the 1890s the city was subject to intrastate migration by African-Americans from Roslyn, looking for work after the closure of the area's mines. Two African-American churches, Calvary Baptist and Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, were founded in 1890. Just three years after the fire, in 1892, James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway arrived in the chosen site for Hill's rail yards, the newly created township of Hillyard (annexed by Spokane in 1924). Spokane became an important rail shipping and transportation hub for the Inland Empire, connecting mines in the Silver Valley with agricultural areas around the Palouse region. The city's population ballooned to 19,922 in 1890, and to 36,848 in 1900 with the arrival of additional railroads. By 1910 the population had hit 104,000, and Spokane eclipsed Walla Walla as the commercial center of the Inland Empire. In time the city came to be known as the "capital" of the Inland Empire and the heart of a vast tributary region. After the arrival of the Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Great Northern, and Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific railroads, Spokane became one of the most important rail centers in the western U.S.