Preston, ID

Although residents of Preston, Idaho began living in the city’s current limits as early as the 1860s, it was almost 40 years before they officially incorporated the town as a formal entity on July 24, 1900; and that was for the purpose of addressing a mud fight. 

Preston is situated on what was once a windblown, sandy flat decorated with grass and sagebrush. Soon after building a fort at Idaho’s first permanent white settlement, Franklin, in 1860, these pioneers pushed north to what they called “North or Head Meadows” (near Johnson Reservoir) to cut grass with a scythe and haul it back to Franklin for their cattle. I wasn’t long before the cattle and sheep eventually stripped the foliage that was holding down the sand it was growing in.

By that time, a few settlers had braved the safety of the fort in Franklin and were trying to build homes out of what they considered wilderness, and the native residents considered home. By 1877, enough settlers had come to the flat that they set up a community school – in the granary of Robert M. Hull, located in the area known today as Whitney. Two years later, the community started to build a new school.

It was the ingenuity of ditch digging that saved those settlers’ homesteading efforts. In 1881, they hired David Jenkins from Salt Lake to survey a ditch. Jensen discovered that water could be brought from the larger, longer-running Cub River, around the hills and into the area they had settled. So important was water to survival, a celebration heralded the ditch water as it crossed into the community for the first time. Men following its arrival to repair any leaks, took their hats off and shouted “Hosanna!” three times. As food could be grown more efficiently, business could be more readily conducted.

Another ingredient to the success of the pioneers was pushing the railroad past Franklin to the flat in 1878. The Utah Northern Railroad brought jobs, money, more people and goods. Eventually, a business center sprang up along the area’s primary north and south street, today known as State Street. The main east and west corridor was called Oneida, honoring the name of the county to which the area belonged. Worm Creek wound through the little community.

Being settled by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the areas became a “ward” (similar to parishes) in the church. So on May 14, 1881, during a meeting of the Worm Creek Ward in the log schoolhouse constructed two years prior, Rachel Porter brought a complaint to visiting Bishop Preston. “Worm Creek” was simply not a respectable name for the community she was helping to build. 

 “Well, Sister Porter, what would you like your little ward called?” asked Preston.

“Let’s name it Preston, after you,” she replied. Apparently anyone with an opinion that counted agreed. Consequently, when the U.S. Government granted a post office in 1882, it was to “Preston” and not “Worm Creek.” 

The town was officially surveyed and platted in 1888. Lombardy poplars lined the street. In 1900, the townsfolk decided to “cut the cord” from its administrative entity, Malad City, the seat of Oneida County. The reason? Mud. Once the sand was tamed, oozing mud had to be next. “Preston floats on quicksand, say the diggers,” explained the late local historian, Newell Hart. “It wasn’t the desire to grow big, or even the natural cry to cut the umbilical cord, that caused the town to incorporate. It was the mud. And this is where Lorenzo Hansen comes in.”

Hansen was the mayor of Preston from 1925-1935. Hansen told Hart that in 1900, “cattle and horses roamed the streets at will. Streets were very dirty in the summer and muddy in winter when not covered with … one to three feet of snow. This also included the sidewalk. You could not walk up Main Street in those days of a freshet unless you had high-topped boots, and then sometimes you sunk a foot or two in the muck.” Things got so bad that a public meeting was called. “A very heated discussion ensued over the question of taxation. It was argued pro and con. Those who lived in Logan before moving to Preston insisted that a village or city government was a very expensive luxury, that sooner or later transient men would come to Preston and say, ‘let’s put Preston on the map’, and plunge the city into debt from which we could not extricate ourselves. Whether the roads should be graded or graveled came in for heated discussion. Finally, there appeared a majority that if some of the old reliable citizens would be named as village trustees and an extremely small levy made that we could get along for a few years and that a sidewalk be laid from the center of town to the Oregon Short Line (OSL) Depot (which still stands on the corner of First South and First West).”

So Preston City incorporated on July 24, 1900, “in the law offices of A.W. Hart, in the Parkinson Block, directly above today’s Owl Billiards,” wrote Hart. “A year later we had boardwalks – but that didn’t stop the mud stories:

“’Mud, mud, mud. Mud inside and mud outside, and mud everywhere! What fine school and shopping weather, you bet your rubber boots! … Five irrigation streams are running south past the Central School – only a good wader can cross … it is claimed that Preston’s streets are good fishing.’”

Nevertheless Preston prospered. In its first decade it had two newspapers, two electric companies, two telephone companies, free band concerts once a week and movie houses. … The town just needed good water, stated Hart.

When the Sego Milk Plant was looking for a home, it turned down Preston due it its “yucky” well water. Following much campaigning, a bond for $75,000 passed to pipe water from Birch Creek. That was accomplished by 1912. In 1913, the county was divided, and the east side, which included Preston, was called Franklin, after apostle Franklin D. Richards of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It is the only Franklin County in the United States NOT named after Benjamin Franklin.