Tautphaus Park and Civic Idaho Falls

Tautphaus Park, on the southwest side of Idaho Falls, is one of the oldest municipal parks in Idaho. A booster club bought the land in nineteen oh nine, and the city bought it in nineteen thirty-four. It is named for Charles Tautphaus, a German immigrant who filed a claim on the land in eighteen eighty-four.

The park eventually grew to include one of the most visited free zoos in the Intermountain West, a small amusement park, and an ice skating rink. The zoo draws well over one hundred thousand visitors a season, making it a genuinely unusual civic asset for a city of Idaho Falls's size. It reflects something characteristic of eastern Idaho's municipal culture: a tendency toward substantial community investment in public amenities, shaped in part by the cooperative ethic that Latter-day Saint settlement brought to the region and reinforced by the stable middle-class wages paid by the national laboratory.