Street names selected during early-day discussion

The street names we see at every corner zip through our heads as we are driving around Sandpoint.

They have no significance and act only as waypoints to tell us we are not lost but headed toward our destination.

They are just there for our convenience and hold no real meaning to most of us until we ask ourselves, “Where did those names come from?” Why Cedar Street instead of Cedar Avenue?

How did they come into being - did someone order a package of street names?

When we find the answer to these questions we find ourselves back in a time when Sandpoint was more of a dense forest than it was a town.

We would be back to a time that the few streets that existed would be populated by more stumps than horses and wagons. We would be back to a time when people had a vision of what could be and were willing to work to bring these dreams to a reality.

It was in the late 1890s that L.D. and Ella Farmin homesteaded 160 acres of land that eventually made up the central part of Sandpoint, Idaho. Larch Street, bordered their acquired land on the north, on the east by the Northern Pacific Railroad, on the south by Pine Street, and Boyer Street on the west.

At the time the streets were named, many of them were not in existence because much of the land was dense forest. But in the minds of Ella Mae and L, D, Farmin, and some friends, there was a future city that needed some names for its streets.

Mr. Farmin had arranged for a civil engineer, William Ashley, to survey and plat the first site of Sandpoint. It was at the Farmin's dining room table that the streets of Sandpoint were named.

At the table were L.D. and Ella Farmin, Josephine LeHuquet, Mrs. Earl Farmin, and William Ashley.

It was the desire of Mr. Farmin that the avenues would run north and south and have numerical names, i.e., First, Second, Third, through Seventh Avenue. The streets were to run east and west and were to be given names of trees that grew in the area.

The honor of naming the first street fell to Miss LeHuquet and Pine Street got its name.

The next to choose was Ella Farmin and she refused to follow her husband's direction and named her street Church Street, because the only church in town was located there.

Mr. Farmin named the main thoroughfare between the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads, Main Street.

When the turn to name a street fell to Mrs. Earl Farmin she named her street Cedar.

She had a special love for the tall cedars found in the area and would, on occasion, ride her horse through the beautiful trees.

Those sitting around the table continued to give us the names of streets we recognize today, such as, Popular, Fir, Alder, and Larch.

I am sure they all would be very surprised if they knew that today, in their Sandpoint, people were using a GPS (Global Positioning System) just to find their way from one condo to another.