Officially, Bayview does not exist
Bayview, Idaho, isn’t really a town – according to the U.S. census of 2000.
And that pretty well sums up the history of Bayview over the past 150 years. It looks like a town, it acts like a town, but it never really has made it as a town, even by North Idaho standards.
There’s an accumulation of people in Bayview – somewhere between 300 and 400 – but the problem is that because Bayview’s not a town, it doesn’t get an official census like Athol and Spirit Lake, Bayview’s two closest neighbors, do.
Bayview is well-known and well-regarded, probably better-known and better-regarded than either of its closest neighbors. Bayview just never got around to getting itself officially organized as a town.
When you know Bayview’s history, this lack of accomplishment is not really surprising.
Just around the bend to the south and the west of Scenic Bay, Bayview’s location on the western side of Lake Pend Oreille near its southern end is Idlewild Bay, the location of the historic Farragut Naval Training Station of World War II and renowned Farragut State Park of today.
At the southwest corner of Idlewild Bay is a smaller bay, Buttonhook Bay. This is where civilized settlement of this part of the lake began with Pend Oreille City in 1864.
Winter trapping camps had been located at Squaw Bay, the original name of Bayview, but these camps, no doubt, were not terribly civilized.
Anyway, to make a long and repetitive story short, precious-metal mining sparked the development of boomtowns all around Lake Pend Oreille and made it profitable to fill the lake with steamboats.
Once people got into the area, timber harvesting was big for a time. Limestone mining and cement production were big for a time.
Over the years, Pend Oreille City prospered and died. Lakeview, Bayview’s neighbor eight miles across the lake, prospered and died – twice. Squaw Bay never really prospered but died anyway and was replaced by Bayview in 1894.
Bayview’s history, however, really began in 1910 when the Prairie Development Co. plotted the town of Bayview with the idea of making it a booming tourist destination. Sound familiar?
This was to become a recurrent theme in the rise and fall of Bayview’s fortunes over the next 100 years.
Due to lumber and limestone, Bayview had a railroad in 1911. It soon had the Bayview Inn, later renamed the Wigwam Lodge. But timber faded, limestone quality deteriorated and the railroad left. However, the scenery and fishing remained good.
Because of – or despite – all this, Bayview never took off as a major resort destination.
Robert Singletary, in his 1994 writings on local history, (“Kootenai Chronicles: A History of Kootenai County,” published by the Museum of North Idaho), nails the aura that always has hung over Bayview by noting its “tremendous potential for further development.”
It just never seems to happen.
Perhaps Robert Holland and his Harborview Marina development should take note: It’s all been tried before but to no avail.
Bayview’s current but little-known claim to fame is a small Navy base called the Acoustic Research Detachment of the Carderock Division of the Naval Sea Systems Command of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. The name is the largest part of the base, which deals in miniature submarines.
Yes, Lake Pend Oreille is full of little submarines. Keep that in mind the next time you hook a whopper on the lake.
According to the Navy, Lake Pend Oreille has an amazingly oceanlike environment. Because of this, the Navy puts large-scale models of submarines in the depths of the lake and tests new concepts in stealth technology.
Regardless of what you may have heard, none of this involves a secret underground river running from Lake Pend Oreille to the Pacific Ocean. At least that’s what the Navy says.
One of the newest submarines here is the 205-ton, 111-foot Cutthroat, an almost one-third-scale model of the new Virginia-class nuclear-powered attack submarines.
This vessel was commissioned in 2001 and was named by Athol schoolchildren after the cutthroat trout. It sounds more like a pirate name to me, but then, I don’t fish.
Once again, an attack submarine is something to think about the next time you are out on Lake Pend Oreille. The Navy claims that most of its testing is done in the depths of the lake in the dead of night on how to reduce the noise submarines make, but I would be wondering if they are doing any torpedo testing.
But who’s to complain?
Along with unseen submarines, Bayview has fishing, boating, sailing, hiking and Farragut State Park.
Things could be worse. All Pend Oreille City has to show for itself is a commemorative sign along state Highway 54 about six miles, as the vulture flies, from the former town site.