In the spring of 1878, soldiers came to the outlet of Lake Coeur d'Alene, where the water slips out of the lake and becomes the Spokane River on its way past Post Falls and Black Bay. General William Tecumseh Sherman had camped by the lake on an inspection tour in 1877 and recommended the spot for a post, and on April 16, 1878, Camp Coeur d'Alene was established there. Before the new post could guard anything, it had to build itself, and in the North Idaho forest the answer to that problem was a sawmill.
The post's first commander, Lieutenant Colonel Henry C. Merriam, built one of the earliest commercial-type sawmills in northern Idaho that same year, 1878. The Forest Service history describes it plainly as a small circular saw outfit with a steam power plant. That mattered. A circular saw driven by steam did not depend on a millrace or a season of high water, and it could turn the tall timber standing around the lake into boards day after day, in a place that had no lumber yard, no railroad, and no town yet beside it.
The mill cut the lumber that raised the post itself, including Army barracks and the assembly and mess halls where the soldiers gathered and ate. Its work reached well beyond the parade ground, too. The same mill cut lumber for a steamboat and for at least one school in the area, so from the beginning the Army's saw was serving the civilian country growing up around the lake as well as the garrison. A later commanding officer added a shingle mill and a planing mill, and with those additions the little post mill had become, in the Forest Service's words, a complete finished-lumber manufacturing plant, one building among some fifty structures on the roughly 640-acre reservation.
The post took new names as the years passed, becoming Fort Coeur d'Alene in 1879 and Fort Sherman in 1887, but the sawmill kept its steady place in the life of the fort. It ran continuously, the Forest Service records, until the fort was decommissioned in 1898. That end came quickly. On April 21, 1898, the command departed for service in the Spanish-American War, and the departure signaled the demise of the fort it had built with its own lumber twenty years before.
Two years after the fort mill started, in 1880, Frederick Post completed his water-powered sawmill downstream at the falls that would carry his name, the first general-purpose sawmill at Post Falls. The two mills mark the beginning of the lumber age on this stretch of river, the Army's steam mill at the lake outlet and Post's mill at the falls below it. Today, North Idaho College occupies much of the old fort site, a lumber company, Stack and Gibbs, bought a large share of the land after the Army left, and only a handful of the original fort buildings remain. The sawmill is long gone, but every building it raised began the same way, as a log from the forest that still stands above Black Bay.
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