Origins of a misnomer

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

I’ve written several times in these pages about the strange proclivity Sandpointians have of saying “Third Street Pier” instead of the actual name, “Third Avenue Pier.”

Like using the grammatically accurate “northern Idaho” instead of the colloquially correct “North Idaho,” saying “Third Avenue Pier” is one of those indicators that shows how long someone has lived here.

Thanks to the sleuthing of a couple of Reader readers, I might have uncovered the origin of this most local of misnomers.

Joey Cottrell sent an old photo of a curious street sign marking “Third St.” instead of the now-correct “Ave.”

“The city must have changed it quite a while back, but didn’t get this sign,” Cottrell wrote.

Intrigued, I wrote to local historian Nancy Foster Renk, who sent a volley of useful information about the origins of Sandpoint street names.

Foster-Renk referred to a Sandpoint News-Bulletin article from Sept. 22, 1949 that references a talk given to the Civic Club by one of the town founders, Nannie Wray Farmin. 

Mrs. Farmin said that Mr. Farmin “wished the streets running north and south to be designated ‘avenues,’ and to be numbered First to Seventh,” while the east-west streets were to be “given names of trees indigenous to the locality.”

“That’s all fine and dandy until you look at the plat map of Sandpoint, done for Mr. Farmin in 1898,” wrote Foster-Renk. “Everything is labeled a street.”

Sure enough, on the 1898 plat map, all the numbered roads are labeled as “streets” instead of “avenues.” It also lists Sandpoint as a municipality of “Kootenai County,” since Bonner County wouldn’t be formed until 1907.

To further complicate matters, the 1904 Sanborn fire map shows all north-south roads as “avenues,” but the names changed south of Pine Street, describing Third Avenue in south Sandpoint as “Golden Gate Avenue” and Second Avenue as “Pend Oreille Avenue.” These names apparently didn’t hold up. When an updated fire map came out five years later, the names “Golden Gate” and “Pend Oreille” avenues reverted to numbered avenues.

So, it appears that Sandpoint called its numbered streets “avenues” for a short time around our town’s founding, and perhaps that name stuck when referring to the odd pier jutting into the river near the sewer outlet.

“My guess is that the pier name is just easier to say as ‘Third Street’ instead of ‘Third Avenue,’ but that’s only a guess,” wrote Foster-Renk.

She also pointed out another humorous story from the June 1, 1943 edition of Northern Idaho News involving the strange habit of Sandpoint locals bathing next to raw sewage — specifically the old sewer pipe extending into the water not far from Third Street Pier.

“The complete indifference of youth to the presence of danger is shown by the practice that has become common of bathing in the water off of the city septic tank,” the article stated. “This seems to be the favorite place for the youngsters to take their swim.”

While this isn’t a smoking gun that solves the mystery of the misnamed pier, it sheds some light on the early days that might have led to our name usages in the present day.

However, the fact that Sandpoint youngsters of the 1940s spent their hot summer days swimming amid sewage begs further questions.

Special thanks to Joey Cottrell and local historian Nancy Foster-Renk for their input on this piece of local lore.