Farragut: Two Hundred Ninety-Three Thousand Sailors Come to Idaho

In March of nineteen forty-two, three months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, ground was broken on a naval training station on the south shore of Lake Pend Oreille, about twenty-five miles south of Sandpoint at a place called Bayview. The Navy had identified the lake as an ideal training location: deep, cold, navigable, and geographically isolated from the coasts that were suddenly under threat. What was built at Farragut, named for Admiral David Farragut of Civil War fame, was enormous by any standard.

By September of nineteen forty-two the base had a population of fifty-five thousand people, making it briefly the largest city in Idaho. Over the thirty months of its operation, two hundred ninety-three thousand sailors received their basic training at Farragut, making it the second-largest naval training facility in the world behind only the Naval Station Great Lakes near Chicago. The last recruit graduated in March of nineteen forty-five.

The station was decommissioned in June of nineteen forty-six, and the land eventually became Farragut State Park. The lake's properties that made it useful for training sailors proved equally useful for something else the Navy needed. Acoustic testing of submarine technology requires a body of water deep enough and quiet enough to replicate ocean conditions without foreign surveillance.

Lake Pend Oreille met the specifications. The Navy's Acoustic Research Detachment at Bayview has been testing large-scale submarine prototypes on the lake since the nineteen sixties, and it continues today. The landlocked lake in the Idaho panhandle remains, without announcing itself, one of the United States Navy's most important testing facilities.