Sandpoint: Lumber Town on the Deepest Lake
Near Sandpoint, Idaho
The Kalispell people fished and hunted on Lake Pend Oreille for generations, and they called this sandy spit at the lake's northern end simply the Point of Sand. David Thompson, the British fur trader, passed through in eighteen oh nine and set up a trading post at the lake.
The real transformation came in eighteen eighty-two when the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed through and built a depot here, calling the stop Sand Point. The Humbird Lumber Company arrived around nineteen hundred and turned the town into a serious logging operation, milling the white pine and cedar forests of the Selkirk Mountains.
When the timber played out mid-century, the town pivoted. Lake Pend Oreille, nearly twelve hundred feet deep, turned out to hold enormous lake trout, and then Schweitzer Mountain Resort opened in nineteen sixty-three and brought skiers. What had been a rough mill town became one of the most livable small cities in the inland Northwest, drawing artists, retirees, and outdoor enthusiasts in roughly equal measure.
