9 Most Overlooked Idaho Towns For 2026

A lumber company laid out a whole town at Potlatch for 2,000 people. The Bureau of Reclamation picked up American Falls and moved it uphill, leaving a grain elevator standing in the reservoir. Frank Gooding put a concrete sidewalk in from his depot to a school for deaf and blind students while every street in town was still dirt. Across Idaho, overlooked towns like these still carry the plans, oddities, and decisions that set them apart.

Potlatch

Potlatch exists because a lumber company drew it first. The Potlatch Lumber Company incorporated in 1903 and opened what became the largest white pine sawmill in the world by 1906. The mill sat far from anywhere in Latah County, near the Washington line, so the company built a town to go with it. The company built for as many as 2,000 people. Houses, boarding houses, a school, and a hospital went up together. Management banned saloons and gambling outright.

The Washington, Idaho and Montana Railway Depot went up first, in June 1906, with walk-in vaults on both floors. Three sets of offices shared it. A museum occupies the building now, keeping the original woodwork and all but one pane of its original glass. Two free walking tour guides, one for the Commercial Historic District and one for the neighborhoods, wait at the depot or the municipal office. Scenic Six Park now covers much of the old mill site, where historical exhibits lay out the company town story. Laird Park, east up the Palouse River, takes its name from a company executive. Its swimming beach exists because the Civilian Conservation Corps dammed the water there in 1933.

Glenns Ferry

The Three Island Crossing ranked as the most difficult ford in Idaho on the Oregon Trail. Wagons ran three channels of the Snake River across gravel bars, and pioneer diaries count the ones who did not make it. In 1869 Gustavus Glenn, a freight hauler running ox teams between Kelton and Boise, built a ferry along the river instead. His boat carried two wagons at a time and cut nearly 20 miles from the route. The town that grew up around the solution carries his name, and Elmore County has kept it since.

The railroad arrived in 1883 and brought the town its first real employer. The company put up a roundhouse, a depot, and an ice house on ground the Stockton family donated. Three Island Crossing State Park now interprets the ford that the ferry replaced. A sandstone schoolhouse of 1909 houses the Glenns Ferry Historical Museum. The original school bell hangs again in its tower, and a covered wagon fills the Three Island Crossing Room. Two blocks over, the Gorby Opera Theater of 1914 keeps its round-arched entryway under a parapeted brick front.

Buhl

Buhl owes its name to a Pennsylvania investor who came west for a mine and never got it. Frank H. Buhl of Sharon, Pennsylvania, reached Salt Lake City in 1901 to inspect a mining property. Learning it had already sold, he looked at a proposed irrigation scheme in the Magic Valley instead. I. B. Perrine met him at the Shoshone depot and introduced him to Peter Kimberly. The two formed the corporation that watered the Twin Falls County desert, and the town went on the map on April 17, 1906.

What the water produced was fish. Springs pour from the canyon walls at a steady temperature the year round, which happens to suit rainbow trout. Balanced Rock rises 48 feet in Salmon Falls Creek Canyon south of town and weighs 40 tons. Its pedestal measures 3 feet by 17 inches, and a signed road northwest of Castleford reaches it. Riverence keeps a viewing window onto its ponds upstream, so anyone can watch trout at every stage of growth. Clear Springs Foods runs its plant on that water, and hatcheries line the canyon below it. Idaho growers sell more farmed trout than any other state.

Gooding

Frank Gooding laid a concrete sidewalk from the depot to the school before he paved a single street. In 1909, as Governor of Idaho, he proposed moving the Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind to the town he was building. He donated the ground for it. Part of the promise was that walkway, so students arriving by train could make the trip themselves. Every road in Gooding County was dirt at the time. The Idaho School for the Deaf and the Blind has run here since 1910 and remains the only such school in the state.

Gooding kept building institutions after that. The Schubert Theatre at 402 Main Street went up in 1920 as a wedding gift from Gooding to his daughter. It seats 400 under painted murals and gold-leafed crown molding. The orchestra pit and dressing rooms survive from its live years. The Gooding County Historical Museum on Euskadi Lane keeps the county's pioneer collection, along with a one-room schoolhouse moved onto the grounds. Up Highway 46, a Bureau of Land Management sign marks the pull-off for Little City of Rocks. The walk in crosses ground that a private landowner maintains.

Oakley

Oakley cut its own town out of the hills behind it. Surveyors laid the townsite out in 1882 in the Goose Creek valley. The builders who followed used what they had, brick from two local yards and quartzite quarried a short way off. That stone is still worked and still shipped, and it goes by the town's name. Cassia County has no better display of what one quarry can do to a main street.

The Oakley Historic District covers the result. Stone and brick houses run block after block, trimmed in wooden gingerbread, with towers on the larger ones and chimneys flaring at the top. Howells Opera House on Blaine Street is the showpiece. Judge B. P. Howells hired two masons and two carpenters in 1904 and finished it in 1907 for $22,000, all of it in Oakley stone. The church that acquired it in the 1920s was weighing demolition by the 1970s. Residents organized, bought it back, and restored it. The Oakley Valley Arts Council puts on three productions a year there now, plus a free concert each December.

American Falls

A concrete grain elevator stands in the American Falls Reservoir with no town around it. The Oneida Milling and Elevator Company put it up in 1912, 106 feet tall, using reinforced concrete when the material was still new. It is the only visible marker of where American Falls used to be. In 1925 the Bureau of Reclamation moved the rest to higher ground in Power County. The tally ran to 46 businesses, three hotels, five churches, and six grain elevators.

The new town went down on a fresh plan, with three residential neighborhoods east, south, and west of a central square. Individual houses that made the trip carry their own federal listings. Among them are the Walter Sparks House on Roosevelt Street and the William Davie House on Hutchinson Avenue. A visitor can stand in front of a bungalow that was dragged uphill. The reservoir keeps the rest, and the submerged townsite took its own federal listing in 2002. When the water drops far enough, the old sidewalks, roads, and foundations come back into view.

Arco, Idaho

Arco lit its streetlights with atomic power for about an hour on July 17, 1955, and no town on earth had done it before. The current came from the BORAX-III reactor out on the desert flats, part of what was then the National Reactor Testing Station. Butte County has traded on that hour ever since. The sign on the edge of town says so in letters a driver can read at speed.

Experimental Breeder Reactor I sits out on US 20 and 26, a National Historic Landmark in its own right. In December 1951 it became the first plant anywhere to make usable electricity from atomic energy. Its museum is open to the public, with four reactors on site, the original control room, and two prototype atomic jet engines mounted outside. In town, the Idaho Science Center displays the sail of the submarine USS Hawkbill, hull number 666, honoring the roughly 40,000 sailors trained in nuclear operations nearby. Craters of the Moon National Monument and Preserve spreads across the lava southwest of town. Above the highway, graduating classes from Butte County High School have painted their year on Number Hill for close to a century.

Mackay, Idaho

Mackay carries the name of the man who owned the mines it went up to serve. The White Knob Mining Company founded the place in 1901 to house its copper operation and named it for major investor John W. Mackay. The railhead reached it soon after. Custer County ranching outlasted the ore, but the workings are all still up there on the hill, and Mount McCaleb rises over the whole arrangement at 11,682 feet, its crown-shaped summit block standing some 6,000 feet above the valley floor. Arco lies south down US 93, and the two towns share the Lost River country between them.

In 2004 Mackay turned its own wreckage into a route. The Mackay Mine Hill Tour runs 20 miles through the mining ground above town, past 19 interpretive sites, with trail maps available in the town office. The ruins of the Cliff City Smelter are up there, plus the White Knob aerial tramway towers and a renovated Shay railroad trestle. Mackay allows all-terrain vehicles on any city street, which is how most people reach the upper routes. The tramway towers still carry their line down the mountain toward a smelter that stopped work decades ago.

Paris, Idaho

Red sandstone rose out of Indian Creek Canyon on the backs of horse and ox teams. In winter the loads came on sleds hauled across the ice of Bear Lake. Bear Lake County settlers had stockpiled the material for years before the work got under way, waiting on other projects to finish first. Joseph Don Carlos Young, a trained architect and a son of Brigham Young, drew the plans. Swiss masons cut and carved the stone. Work ran from 1884 to 1889.

What they built is the Paris Tabernacle, formally the Bear Lake Stake Tabernacle, on Main Street. Young designed it so that everyone inside could see the pulpit. The geometry does the work: a sloping floor, a gallery on the second level, and a choir loft curved in a half circle. Wilford Woodruff dedicated it in 1889, and very little has changed since. Tours run through the summer. Across the street, the Paris Historical Museum keeps pioneer photographs, a wooden cash register, and medicine bottles from the old general store. Bear Lake itself lies a few miles southeast, the same water the loaded sleds once crossed.

What the Drawings Left Behind

Nine towns, and in every one somebody sat down with a plan first. Companies built Potlatch and Mackay for their own workers. Buhl and Gooding came out of irrigation money. American Falls moved uphill wholesale to make room for water, and Paris assembled itself from stone dragged over a frozen lake. The plans did not all turn out the way the planners intended, which is much of why the leftovers repay the drive.