For most of its first century, Post Falls grew slowly, and that was fine with the people who lived here. By the turn of the century the town counted about 600 residents and an incorporated school system, built around timber and the land itself. Farms and orchards spread along the timbered heights to the south and across the Rathdrum Prairie to the north, the mill worked beside the falls, and the town carried a nickname that said a lot about its outlook: Pioneer Town With the Progressive Spirit.
Geography had always shaped that life. Post Falls sits four miles east of the Washington-Idaho border, bounded by Coeur d'Alene to the east, the state of Washington to the west, the Spokane River to the south and the Rathdrum Prairie to the north. It is 20 miles east of Spokane and 100 miles south of the Canadian border. For generations that meant Post Falls was a place travelers passed on their way somewhere else, between a larger city in Washington and the lake country of Idaho.
The highway changed the equation. With the completion of Interstate 90 through Post Falls in the 1970s, the traffic that had once simply passed by now arrived at the town's doorstep, and local business leaders gave the town a new label to match: the western gateway to North Idaho. The phrase was more than a slogan. A mill town that had grown around a river and a prairie now stood at the entrance to the whole region, and growth that had been steady for decades began to quicken.
By the end of the next decade the change was impossible to miss. In 1989, Idaho Governor Cecil Andrus labeled Post Falls the fastest growing little town in Idaho. Town leaders, meanwhile, were working to broaden an economy long tied to timber and agriculture. Economic diversification became the goal, including tourist-based business meant, in the words of the town's own history, to slow down the traveling public so visitors would stay awhile for the activities, events and natural beauty of the area.
From Black Bay, that growth is easy to read in the town around the bay. The river that powered the first mill still runs along the south edge of town, and the prairie that fed the first farms still opens to the north, but the community between them is no longer a wide spot on the road. The gateway years turned passing traffic into neighbors, and Post Falls has been learning ever since how to grow without losing the river town it started as.
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