Kootenai celebrates community's centennial

KOOTENAI — Now 70, Tom Spade lives just a short distance away from where he he was born.

Looking an old photo of his mother, older brother and himself as a toddler in the early 1940s — one of hundreds lining the walls of Kootenai City Hall to mark the city’s centennial — Spade said he could remember when the city’s streets turned to mud in the spring and far fewer homes.

While his family moved to Sagle when he was a few years old, Wade eventually moved back to Kootenai, landing within a few blocks of where he was born.

“I remember the mud streets, the old homes from Humbird and people were dirt poor,” he recalled, slowly making his way around the room, pausing here and there to look at old photographs.

Wade and his wife, Barbara Mask Spade, were just a few of the hundreds of residents from throughout the region who turned out for the celebration marking Kootenai’s 100th year.

Like her husband, Barbara Spade was born in Kootenai but lived throughout the area as the family moved, going to school in Kootenai, Sagle and Sandpoint.

“We all used to walk to the grocery store, we’d all walk to church and we walked a couple of miles to catch the bus for school,” she said. “We walked everywhere in those days.”

Like other communities in the area, life in Kootenai centered around family and the community, said Spade. Their family’s home was in the old part of the city — located across the highway from where today’s Kootenai is found.

Like her husband, Barbara Spade remembers the mud-filled roads in the spring. Where fields and empty lots used to be, there are now homes and roads, she recalled.

From a pancake breakfast and a barbecue lunch to the photo exhibit and music and children’s games in the city park, the event was centered around families and the community, Maggie Mjelde, the city’s long-time mayor, said.

The city dates back to the days when Northern Pacific Railroad built a division point and Humbird Lumber established a mill in the community in 1908. People moved to the area to be close to where they worked and, within a short time, the village was one of the biggest in the area.

The city was incorporated in 1910 and, in its heyday, was home to four hotels, three boarding houses, several banks, and plenty of saloons, said Mjelde.

Glimpses into that rich history could be seen Saturday, with simple numbered circle marking the spots of the city’s first park, the livery stable, and the Occidental Hotel, which furnished lodging for the working class. The hotel, built in 1909, was torn down in November 1949, leaving only the old bank building and the Bonner Store as the last remainders of the city’s original business district.

The tour also offered glimpses into sites once housing the Bonner Trading Company, the Painter Hotel and the city’s jail among others as well as the sites where Humbird and Northern Pacific once stood.

At their height, the mill employed more than 500 people and the railroad about 1,200, according to old newspaper articles she found while researching Kootenai’s history for the centennial celebration, Mjelde said.

“The numbers were surprising,” she said. “I didn’t realize it was so big.”