Bonner County: How a Railroad Stop Became the Seat of Its Own County
Near Sandpoint, Idaho
When the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived at the south shore of Lake Pend Oreille in eighteen eighty-two, it opened the forests of north Idaho to industrial-scale logging. A settlement formed near the sandy point of land that gave it its name, and the Great Northern Railroad soon built a depot there, calling the stop Sand Point, two words. The Village of Sandpoint was officially incorporated on February seventh, nineteen oh one.
At that time, Sandpoint was part of the enormous Kootenai County, which stretched across most of the Idaho panhandle. As the population of the Pend Oreille region grew, the distances involved in county governance became impractical. In nineteen oh seven, the Idaho Legislature divided Kootenai County and created Bonner County, named for Edwin L.
Bonner, a ferryman who had operated a crossing on the Kootenai River decades earlier. Sandpoint became the county seat, the governmental and commercial center of a county that originally stretched north to the Canadian border, covering roughly eighteen hundred square miles of mountains, lakes, rivers, and forest. The county's population today is still small by most measures, but Bonner County contains some of the most dramatic geography in the Northwest, and Sandpoint sits at its center, on its sandy point, between the lake and the mountains, as it always has.
