Hailey, Bellevue, and the Boom Towns of the Wood River Valley

Ketchum was not the only town that appeared in the Wood River Valley during the silver rush of the eighteen eighties. The boom spawned a string of communities along the valley floor, each staking its own claim on the commerce flowing in and out of the mountains. Hailey, a few miles south, became the county seat of Blaine County and grew large enough to support its own newspaper, the Wood River Times.

Hailey was named for John Hailey, a prominent stagecoach operator and Idaho politician. The town's most famous historical connection came from a family that lived there briefly. The poet Ezra Pound was born in Hailey in eighteen eighty-five, though his family moved east when he was about eighteen months old and he spent his life elsewhere.

Bellevue, still farther south, served as a supply point for miners and ranchers throughout the valley. Smaller camps appeared and disappeared as individual claims played out. The valley at its boom peak held a genuine regional economy, with newspapers, hotels, banks, and social clubs operating across multiple communities within a few miles of each other.

When the ore ran thin in the early eighteen nineties the contraction hit the whole valley at once. Hailey survived as a market town and county seat. Ketchum shifted its economy to sheep.

Some of the smaller camps simply faded. The network of roads and railroads those communities built to serve the mines shaped how the valley developed through every era that followed.