Blackfoot

Central Ferry on the Snake

The Oregon Shortline Railway Depot, begun in October 1912 and completed for use on August 15, 1913, now houses the Idaho Potato Museum.^4,5 Blackfoot, the county seat of Bingham County, stands near the juncture of the Snake and Blackfoot rivers, in the far eastern portion of Idaho.^2,6

In the mid-1860’s Tilford Kutch settled near the present town and began a ferry business.⁷ By 1878 Theodore T. Danilson was operating the ferry, and a bridge at Blackfoot was completed in 1881.⁷ The rails reached the crossing, then called Central Ferry, by the winter of 1878, and it was renamed Blackfoot and granted a post office on March 20, 1879.¹ The town was established in 1878 as a railroad town on the Utah and Northern Railway, its original townsite on the homestead of former cavalryman Watson Shilling.³ Blackfoot was at first a terminus for freight shipping to the Wood River, but it lost that trade to the Oregon Short Line terminus at Shoshone in 1882.³

County Seat, Asylum, and Stake

In 1885 Blackfoot was named county seat of Bingham County, and a mental asylum was located there the same year.³ In 1885 Blackfoot was the center of political controversy, with anti-Mormons wanting the town made the county seat, and after 1890 an influx of Mormon settlers added to its population.³ Blackfoot counted 1,174 people in 1890 and grew from 1,330 to 2,202 between 1900 and 1910.⁸

James Duckworth, an English-born Mormon, was asked in 1907 to serve as a leader of the Blackfoot stake, and he prospered as a sheep rancher.³ In 1920, by then a vice-president of the Blackfoot City Bank, Duckworth presided over the construction of the $78,000 Blackfoot LDS Tabernacle.³ Pope and Burton of Salt Lake City designed the building, and in 1976 Bingham County purchased it for a Civic Center.⁹

Canals, the Stone Depot, and the Fair

Most of the 400 miles of canals were dug in the wintertime with hand plows and slip scrapers drawn by horses, and the first water from the People’s canal reached Moreland in 1898.¹⁰ The marker the Sons of Utah Pioneers erected in Blackfoot says the canals brought water from the rivers to a sagebrush plain that would become the Potato Capital of the World.¹⁰

The Oregon Short Line appropriated $27,000 for a new passenger depot, built of pink and gray stone quarried at nearby Rexburg.⁴ In May 1913 the station sold 600 tickets, one every six minutes day and night, and eight passenger trains came and went daily on the mainline.⁴ The Southeastern Idaho Fair Association held the first fair in October 1902, on a site chosen for the race track built there about 1890.² The WPA built the covered grandstand at the fairgrounds in 1938 for $20,000, and World War II canceled the fair in 1942 and 1943.² The 1937 state guide sent State 27 out of Blackfoot into the northwest, where it soon left the fertile Snake River Valley for an enormous desolation of volcanic outpourings.¹¹ The town reached 3,937 people by 1920, dropped to 3,199 in 1930, and stood at 10,065 in 1980.⁸

Brick and Lava Rock on Shilling and Bridge Streets

The ten houses of the North Shilling Historic District were built between about 1884 and 1919, in styles from Queen Anne onward.¹² St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, a carpenter-Gothic structure, dates from 1891.¹² The house at 190 N. Shilling, built in 1905 for merchant John G. Brown, is now the Bingham County Museum.^5,12 Blackfoot’s post office, dated 1936, was one of fourteen post offices constructed in Idaho between 1931 and 1941.¹ The two-story I.O.O.F. Hall, built late in 1905, leaves its rough lava-rock walls exposed at the rear.¹³