Thomas McCall and the Town He Built from a Horse Trade

McCall the town owes its name to a straightforward transaction. In eighteen eighty-nine, a man named Thomas McCall, who had been trading horses across the Idaho territory, arranged to swap horses with a settler named Sam Dever in exchange for a cabin and one hundred sixty acres of land on the south shore of Payette Lake. The deal was the beginning of the town.

McCall moved fast. He established a school, a hotel, a saloon, and a post office, appointed himself postmaster, and set the community on its feet. The town was incorporated on July nineteenth, nineteen eleven.

But the thing that made it commercially viable rather than just a homesteader's clearing was timber, and timber needed a railroad. The Oregon Short Line Railroad, a subsidiary of the Union Pacific, completed its track to McCall in nineteen fourteen. The connection made commercial logging profitable at a scale no wagon road could have supported.

Timber from the surrounding Payette National Forest flowed through town, and the Hoff and Brown Lumber Company became the largest employer and remained so for much of the twentieth century. The Hoff and Brown mill closed in nineteen seventy-seven. By that point, tourism had already begun to replace timber, but the decades of logging shaped the town's layout, its neighborhoods, and its identity as a working mountain community before it became a resort.