Long before ski lifts climbed the Selkirks, timber built the towns below Schweitzer. The forests around Lake Pend Oreille held prized western white pine and cedar, and once the railroads arrived, that green wealth drew loggers, mill hands, and whole new communities to Bonner County. Sandpoint grew from about 300 people in 1900 to roughly 3,000 by 1906 and about 5,000 by 1908, and boosters of the day claimed it shipped more cedar poles than any other city in the United States.
The giant of the era was the Humbird Lumber Company. Frederick Weyerhaeuser and John A. Humbird incorporated it in 1900, and the company came to hold more than 150,000 acres of forest. Its big, steam-powered mill across Sand Creek from Sandpoint was among the most modern of its day, and at its height Humbird employed about 550 people across its mills, yards, stores, bank, and offices. In a county with some 20 mills at work, timber was not just an industry here. It was daily life.
West of Sandpoint, the Dover Lumber Company laid out a mill town in 1906 on a site first called Welty. Four years later the settlement took the name Dover, matching the company and honoring Canal Dover, Ohio, home of its principal stockholders. The Dover mill closed in 1920, and the town might have faded away. Instead, fire gave it a second life. When the sawmill at nearby Laclede burned in 1922, its owner, A. C. White, bought the idle Dover mill rather than rebuild where he was.
What White did next is still one of Bonner County's favorite stories. Dover needed housing for mill workers, so he moved a village by water. Some 55 buildings were loaded onto barges and floated up the Pend Oreille River from Laclede, among them dozens of homes, furnishings still inside, and a warehouse measuring 80 by 200 feet. The move began in the fall of 1922, paused when the river froze, and finished in the spring of 1923. One building, a summer cottage White had built for his family, was cut into three pieces for the trip, reassembled in Dover, and became a church that still stands today.
The boom did not last forever. Humbird's Sandpoint mill closed in 1931 as the best white pine was depleted and the Great Depression deepened, and the empty mill burned in 1940. Yet the timber era never really left. About 30 of the barged Dover homes are still standing, the old Dover church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the managed forests you see from Schweitzer's slopes are the living descendants of those early woods. Next time you ride the lift on a quiet morning, picture the river below busy with log rafts, mill whistles, and an entire town floating toward its new home.