Beach’s Colorful Past Paints Picture Of Cooperation History, Memoirs Reveal Plenty Of Use, Little Tension In Earlier Days

Sanders Beach property owners have private property rights on their side.

But beach users have history on theirs.

For more than 100 years, the beach has been a gathering spot for townspeople, even before Coeur d’Alene’s borders included that stretch of sand.

The beach was named after V.W. Sander, Coeur d’Alene’s first postmaster. Sander ran a general merchandise store that, by the turn of the century, carried the largest stock of goods in North Idaho.

Back in 1891, steamboat builders Peder C. Sorensen and Peter W. Johnson used the beach to build the Georgie Oakes, fondly known as “The Queen of the Lake,” which could carry up to 1,000 passengers.

Sixteen years later, Irishman Jack Finney and his wife Harriette arrived in Coeur d’Alene by an ox-driven wagon and set up a tent house on Sanders Beach.

They moved when the Weyerhaeuser Co. built a mansion at the site for banker and timberman Huntington Taylor, who managed the Rutledge sawmill until 1928.

Two of Taylor’s children, Margaret and Sally, started the Polar Bear Club, which celebrated each New Year with a plunge into the lake from Sanders Beach. The annual Polar Bear Plunge continues to this day.

Fritz Jewett succeeded Taylor at the mill and took up residence in the stately house. The Jewett family donated the house and its beach to the City of Coeur d’Alene in 1978.

As more people moved to Coeur d’Alene, Sanders Beach was discovered as the place to go swimming. The shores closest to town were too busy and polluted.

Houseboats moored on the long docks near City Beach dumped their waste directly into the lake, according to memoirs of John McFarland, who was born in 1903.

Sanders Beach, in contrast, only had one dock and boathouse, belonging to Marshal Taylor.

“Mr. Taylor had no objections to kids diving from his dock or even from the roof of the boathouse,” McFarland wrote. Some kids would dive deeper to explore the sunken hull of a steam launch about 12 feet under water, he wrote.

William B. McFarland, John’s older brother by 16 years, wrote that his Uncle Will used to hitch up his horse to give lifts to ladies from town who wanted to swim at the beach. They’d change in makeshift dressing rooms fashioned from the skeletal remains of an old mill and blankets.

Art Manley, 82, was 6 years old when he learned to swim on the west end of Sanders Beach, where a copper-roofed house now sits. His family only lived five blocks away.

He recalled that a springboard used to launch kids off the rocks into the water.

“There’s hardly a year that I’ve missed swimming down there at the beach,” Manley said. “About the only time I missed was the two years I spent overseas in World War II.”

Greg Crimp, 49, remembers sleeping out on the beach in the summer. He grew up in one of the lakeshore homes, and spent nearly every summer day on the beach.

“We didn’t have to jump over fences or anything,” he said.

In those days, he said, the beach seemed busier with families and children. The neighboring homeowners didn’t have a real problem with nighttime rowdies or litter, as they do today.

“There was less junk floating around, and fewer fast food places,” he said. “People respected the property in general.”

, DataTimes