Huetter, Idaho: Idaho's Smallest City

Tucked between Coeur d'Alene and Post Falls in the Idaho panhandle, Huetter makes a claim almost no other place in the state can match: it is among the smallest incorporated cities in the country by area. The whole town covers about twenty-six acres. John Theodore Huetter gave it his name when the settlement took shape in the early nineteen hundreds, and it incorporated officially in nineteen oh five.

In the nineteen seventies, before Interstate Ninety went through, Huetter sat on the main highway and had a sawmill, a bar, and a dance hall. The freeway bypassed it, the surrounding towns grew around it, and Huetter settled into its permanent character: a neighborhood-sized city of about a hundred people that exists on paper as a municipality and on the ground as a quiet cluster of homes between two larger places.