Caldwell: Railroad Town at the Edge of the Desert

Caldwell was platted in eighteen eighty-three by Robert Strahorn, a railroad promoter who named it after Alexander Caldwell, a former United States Senator from Kansas. The railroad came first, and the town followed as a tent city almost overnight. Within a decade Caldwell had become the commercial hub for the agricultural communities spreading across southwestern Idaho and into eastern Oregon, sitting at the edge of the high desert where irrigation from the Snake River was turning dry land into farms.

The Caldwell Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, covers the blocks of Main Street built out between eighteen ninety-four and nineteen eleven, a compact record of what a railroad boomtown looked like when it was optimistic and flush. The College of Idaho was founded here in eighteen ninety-one, just a year before Idaho became a state.