Thirteen Miles That Saved a Town: The Branch Line From Hauser Junction

For its first few years, Frederick Post's village at the falls had water power, a sawmill, and a problem. When the Northern Pacific Railroad built through North Idaho in 1881 and 1882, its main line crossed Rathdrum Prairie well north of the Spokane River, and the growth that followed the rails went with it. Post Falls, for all its falling water and timber, was bypassed. A mill town without a railroad had to wagon its lumber and flour out and its supplies in, and everyone in the little settlement understood what that could mean in the long run.

The remedy came from Daniel C. Corbin, the Spokane builder who saw opportunity in a short branch line. Corbin settled on a junction point seven miles west of Rathdrum, where an old log cabin was cleared away and housing went up for the track crews. The work did not begin smoothly. Idaho Magazine's account of Hauser recalls that one of Corbin's engines became stuck fast in a muddy quagmire before the line was fairly started. The crews pushed on anyway, and Kootenai County's historic preservation plan notes that the branch was completed largely by Chinese laborers, whose work tied the prairie, the river, and the lake together with steel.

In 1886 the Spokane Falls and Idaho Railroad was finished: thirteen and a half miles from the Northern Pacific main line through what is now Post Falls to the steamboat docks at Coeur d'Alene City. Corbin named the junction where the branch left the main line Hauser Junction, after a good friend. Trains reached Coeur d'Alene on October 24, 1886, and at the lake, freight and passengers could transfer between train and steamboat, the first link in the chain that carried miners and supplies toward the Coeur d'Alene mines. The Northern Pacific absorbed the little road in 1887, and the branch became known as the Fort Sherman Branch.

Short as it was, the branch punched far above its length. Territorial Governor George Shoup's 1890 report to the Department of the Interior, quoted in Idaho Magazine, recorded that for the year ending in July 1889 the Spokane Falls and Idaho carried approximately eighty thousand tons of ore, more than any other railway operating in Idaho. Ore coming out of the mountains, lumber and flour going out of the mills, and goods coming in for a growing town all moved over those thirteen and a half miles, and the county's preservation plan credits the branch with boosting Coeur d'Alene past Rathdrum as the supply point for the mines.

For Post Falls itself, the branch meant the bypass was not the end of the story. Within a short time new businesses were taking advantage of the water power beside the new rails, among them the Dart Brothers flour mill, built in 1889. The village that had watched the main line pass it by was a railroad town after all, with a depot, a junction named for a builder's friend, and a direct line to the lake. From Black Bay, looking west toward Hauser, it is still easy to picture it: a small train on a short line, doing the work that kept a young town on the map.