Long before the red-brick powerhouse at Post Falls sent out its first electricity, a wire was already carrying power toward the mines. The story of electric power at the falls actually begins with a problem a hundred miles away, in the silver country of the Coeur d'Alene mining district.
For their first fifteen years, those mines ran on a seasonal rhythm. Frozen streams cut off their water power in winter, and dwindling wood supplies limited their steam plants. By 1900, with so much money sunk into deep shafts, the owners could not accept that pace any longer. They needed power twelve months a year: electric drills outworked compressed-air drills, and ever-deeper mines needed electricity for pumping and ventilation. Small water, wood, and coal generators near the mines were not enough, so the owners formed a transmission company to build a dam and power plant at Post Falls and carry the electricity to the district.
On August 1, 1900, a group of mine owners bought Frederick Post's site at the falls, 270.3 acres, more than half of it under water, for 25,000 dollars. When their own effort stalled, they turned to the Washington Water Power Company, which agreed to take on the project with contracts from six mining companies in hand. The company bought the Post Falls property in early 1902 and sold additional stock to finance the work.
Remarkably, the line came before the powerhouse. Construction began in the summer of 1902, and crews living in tent camps strung the wire across the flat Rathdrum Prairie country, around the south end of Lake Coeur d'Alene, and up the Coeur d'Alene River valley. Laborers earned twenty cents an hour and linemen forty-five cents, working nine-hour days, six days a week. The line was completed on August 25, 1903, running about 100 miles to Burke and described at the time as the longest high-voltage transmission line in the world. General manager D. L. Huntington had the plans reviewed beforehand by Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the celebrated electrical engineer who had formulated the theory of alternating current, and Steinmetz approved them. At first, because the Post Falls plant was not yet built, the power on that new line came out of Spokane.
The falls caught up three years later. The Post Falls powerhouse first went into production on July 12, 1906, with three generators, and a fourth and fifth followed in 1907 and 1908. In 1907 a second 60,000-volt line was built from Post Falls to Burke, this time over Fourth of July Pass. Washington Water Power, renamed Avista in 1999, still runs the plant today, where six generating units in the middle channel produce up to 15 megawatts, enough for about 11,250 homes. For Black Bay neighbors watching the river slide past the park, it is worth remembering that this stretch of the Spokane once lit and ventilated mines a mountain range away, and that the wire, improbably, came first.
- Log in to post comments