Did you know that Idaho's largest city in the fall of 1942 was not Boise, but a Navy boot camp on the southern tip of Lake Pend Oreille, more than 300 miles from the Pacific coast? That was Farragut Naval Training Station, built in a rush after the attack on Pearl Harbor at Bayview, between Sandpoint and Coeur d'Alene. The station was named for David Farragut, the first admiral in the United States Navy and its leading naval officer during the Civil War, and for a brief, remarkable season it turned quiet lakeshore fields into a small nation of sailors.
Ground was broken in March 1942, and the pace still staggers the imagination. By September of that same year the base held 55,000 people, making it the largest city in Idaho and, at the time, the second-largest naval training center in the world. Liberty trains carried sailors to Spokane three times a day. Over the 30 months the station operated, 293,381 sailors received their basic training at Farragut, learning to march, row, swim, and handle firearms on the shore of Idaho's deepest lake before shipping out to the Mediterranean and the South Pacific.
Everyday life at Farragut left traces that Sandpoint still keeps. In 1942, Lieutenant Commander Henry T. McMaster, the station's supervisor of support services, hired Sandpoint studio photographer Ross Hall to make group and portrait photographs of every recruit and company. Hall employed as many as 15 workers and built an archive of more than 300,000 images, a portrait of a generation in uniform. The station also held nearly 900 German prisoners of war, who worked as gardeners and maintenance men around the grounds.
The last recruit graduated in March 1945, and the station was decommissioned in June 1946. The grounds took on a second life from 1946 to 1949 as the Farragut College and Technical Institute, which closed for financial reasons and did not reopen in late 1949. The land had been transferred to the state of Idaho in 1949, and in 1965 it became Farragut State Park. Today its 4,000 acres hold campgrounds, trails, and beaches, and its former confinement building survives as the Museum at the Brig, open each year from Memorial Day to Labor Day, where visitors can walk the cells and see boot camp memorabilia.
The Navy, remarkably, never entirely left. Beside the park at Bayview, the Navy still maintains the Acoustic Research Detachment, a submarine research center that uses the lake's deep, quiet water, 1,150 feet deep near the southern end, to test large-scale submarine models. So the heritage at Farragut is not only preserved, it is still working. On a quiet morning at the state park, with campers launching boats where recruits once drilled, you are standing in one of the most surprising and living chapters of North Idaho history, an easy day trip south from Schweitzer and Sandpoint.