Did you know that Sandpoint once had a floating ballroom? In 1908 the Northern Navigation Company built the steamer Northern right here in town, at the present-day site of Sandpoint City Beach. At 102 feet long, with two decks and a screw propeller instead of a paddle wheel, she was built for work on Lake Pend Oreille, but she was dressed for a good time, with a ballroom for dancing and live entertainment, an electric-powered orthophonic phonograph, and seating on the stern made for picnic lunches.
The Northern was one of more than 100 steamboats that plied Lake Pend Oreille between 1866 and 1930, and in her prime she made a daily trip the length of the lake, from Sandpoint at its northern tip to Bayview at the southern end. Well-dressed excursion parties gathered their box lunches and boarded at the Sandpoint city dock for picnics at the small communities along the eastern shore, watching the shoreline roll by from her open decks.
For all the music and outings, her primary job was plainer and more important: carrying the mail and freight. The Northern Navigation Company held the United States mail contract between Sandpoint, Hope and Bayview, and the boat stopped at Lakeview, Granite Creek, Bayview, Midas, now Garfield Bay, Glengary and Hope. In the early 1900s, water was the only way to reach many of those communities at all, and the Northern also hauled freight and livestock across the lake.
Her most famous passenger came in early April 1911, when former President Theodore Roosevelt spent a day in Sandpoint. After speaking to a group at the Central School and having lunch at a local restaurant, Roosevelt was escorted down to the city dock and taken out on Lake Pend Oreille aboard the steamboat, a Sandpoint welcome that showed off the town's proudest vessel on its home water.
The Northern's reign ended abruptly on Saturday, November 12, 1927, when fire took her. The fire department responded, but by the time its pressure pump could be started, the vessel was a total loss, and no other steamboat ever filled the void she left. Automobiles, improving roads and the railroads were already offering cheaper, faster ways to move people and freight, and the lake's steamboat era faded with her. Next time you stand on City Beach, picture her tied up there, decks crowded and music playing, where Sandpoint's lake life once set sail.