Meridian: From Dairy Town to Idaho's Fastest City

Meridian takes its name from the Boise Meridian, the north-south survey line from which Idaho land surveys are measured. When Eliza Zenger's land was platted into a townsite in eighteen ninety-three, the town took the name a local lodge had chosen to mark that geographic alignment. The town's first dairy farm opened in eighteen ninety-seven, and for decades Meridian was the center of the Ada County dairy industry, anchored by a cooperative creamery that opened in nineteen twenty-nine and kept farmers solvent through the Depression.

Then the Boise metro expanded. Meridian was a town of ten thousand in the nineteen nineties; by twenty twenty-four it had passed a hundred and forty thousand residents, a growth of nearly nineteen percent since twenty twenty alone, making it the fastest-growing city in Idaho and one of the fastest in the country.