Two ladies seated on Sandpoint City Beach.
Houseboats on City Beach By the Bonner County Historical Society & Museum|Photo courtesy of the Bonner County Historical Society & Museum.
It is hard to imagine Sandpoint City Beach a quiet and unrevealed place. A place for wildlife and a few locals just looking to get a bath. A 1915 Pend Oreille Review news article describes the increasing popularity of the sandy beach in Sandpoint: “… A few [people] have every year taken advantage of the beach for bathing purposes, but never before have the people been drawn there in throngs as they have this year.”
Of course, people continued to come and enjoy the sandy lake shore for a refreshing dip under the big blue mountains.
Today the many visitors who come every summer have the luxury of two bathroom/changing facilities to accommodate the privacy to change, but this was not always the case. For a while there were one or two tents and little cedar forts quickly thrown together on the beach, but in 1921 they had two houseboats partitioned into dressing rooms with eight lockers. That would be a rocky suit change on a windy day.
