Audio tour highlights history

COEUR d’ALENE – Did you know that Fort Sherman used to flood with some regularity, or that steamships were keys to the success of early mining in the area?

Ever heard of the Desert Hotel which burned down in 1972? It stood where the Bonsai Bistro is now located.

Coeur d’Alene residents and visitors alike can bone up on local history with a brand-new audio tour of the city produced by members of last year’s local Leadership class and on sale at the Coeur d’Alene Chamber of Commerce.

A handful of class members headed up the “Discover Coeur d’Alene Driving Tour” project as their gift back to Coeur d’Alene’s Leadership program, recruiting the talent, producing the CD and accompanying booklet and raising money to record and reproduce the audio tour.

“You can live here a long time and not know all the history,” said Leadership class and audio tour participant Melanie Ellingson. “Plus we thought new people moving to the area needed to learn the history of the town.”

The tour is introduced by celebrity Patty Duke, who then turns the microphone over to Coeur d’Alene Mayor Sandi Bloem for driving directions and local historian Robert Singletary for commentary.

Singletary, who is president of the North Idaho Museum and owner of a business called History Unlimited, said he often gives bus tours of Coeur d’Alene for convention visitors but that it was an entirely different experience recording the tour.

“When you put it in a script and are doing it in a studio rather than from a bus, that is challenging. You have to visualize what (the people listening) are seeing,” he said.

At one point he discusses Coeur d’Alene Park and its early incarnation in the 1900s as Blackwell Park, a place with a bandstand, beautiful gardens and steamboat excursions of the lake.

The largest log structure in the Northwest was right there on the beach near an amusement park pier. It burned down in 1972.

The CD also touches on architecture and famous people in Coeur d’Alene’s history.

“A lot of those homes were owned by early industrialists and logging company and mine owners,” said Mark Butera, pointing at historic homes on the lake as he drove the tour.

Butera, who is one of the audio tour project leaders, said that he and the others involved saw the tour as a way to give back to the community.

Driving tour participants are encouraged to have one person drive and another navigate with the enclosed map.

The Leadership group completed the tour on the cheap, spending just $2,900 to produce it.

Singletary donated his work because one-third of the proceeds from CD sales will go to the North Idaho Museum. The rest of the money will go to the Chamber of Commerce and to sustain the audio driving tour program by updating it as necessary and printing more copies.

Singletary was a natural choice for narrator because he knows so much about local lore, Butera said.

“We knew he’d just have to hit the high points.”

Butera said that he hopes people who take the audio driving tour will be inspired to learn more about local history at the museum and to improve the community like past residents.

“You’re stepping into something and carrying on what people have done before,” he said.