Imagine Idaho's largest city in 1942. Not Boise — a brand-new Navy base rising out of the pine forest at the south end of Lake Pend Oreille. After Pearl Harbor, the Navy needed a safe inland site to train the flood of new recruits, and it chose the wooded shoreline between Bayview and Athol. Ground was broken in March 1942, and crews built a small city almost overnight.
By that September, some 55,000 people lived on the base — sailors, staff, and support workers — making Farragut the biggest "city" in Idaho, larger than Boise. Named for Civil War hero Admiral David Farragut, the station sprawled across thousands of acres with barracks, mess halls, drill fields, a 2,300-bed hospital, and six camps named for sailors lost in the line of duty. Even German prisoners of war worked the grounds as gardeners and maintenance crews.
Over 30 months of operation, Farragut put 293,381 recruits through basic training, plus more than 25,000 sailors through specialty service schools — gunnery, radioman, signalman, hospital corpsman. That made it the second-largest naval training center in the world, behind only Great Lakes in Illinois. At least two Medal of Honor recipients and a future Idaho governor, Don Samuelson, passed through its gates.
The last recruit graduated in March 1945, and the base was decommissioned in June 1946. From 1946 to 1949 the grounds served as the Farragut College and Technical Institute before it folded, and in 1966 the site became Farragut State Park — today a beloved camping, boating, and trail destination.
One of the few surviving buildings is the Brig, the confinement facility where unruly recruits spent their time behind barred windows and jail cells. It now houses the Museum at the Brig, with boot camp and naval memorabilia dedicated to the nearly 300,000 recruits who trained here. After years of water damage, the Idaho Department of Parks and Recreation replaced the roof and cut the ribbon on the restored Brig on May 22, 2025.
Walk the park's 40-plus miles of trails today and you're walking old parade grounds. The barracks are gone, but Farragut's ghost navy still echoes across the water — just down the hill from Schweitzer.