This church is significant in the town of Dover as the only remaining public structure moved from LaClede to Dover after a fire on August 17, 1922 destroyed A. C. White's lumber mill. He decided to rebuild a mill in Dover rather than rebuild the LaClede mill, and the town of LaClede followed, with more than 50 buildings being barged up the river from LaClede to Dover.
Built as a summer cottage along the Pend Oreille River in Laclede, it was not finished before being moved. When it arrived in Dover it was donated to the town by A. C. White to be used as a church by the Baptist Community Church.
To this day, every Sunday morning, the faithful are called to worship by the tolling of the bell in the belfry.
The one-story frame building is H-shaped in plan, with only the addition of the entry belfry breaking the symmetry. A moderately pitched hip roof covers the structure. The main ridge is higher than those of the ells. The belfry roof mirrors that of the main structure, spreading wide above the louvered vents.
An unusual feature of the frame church is the exterior wall finish of cedar bark. The strips of bark are laid vertically over shiplap sub-siding, giving a rustic appearance. The rustic theme is continued in the unpeeled cedar poles used to form the figure-four brackets that support the roof corners and a flower box under the left front windows. While unusual for a church building, these rustic touches would have been entirely appropriate for the building's intended use as a summer cottage for a well-to-do lumberman.
The Dover Church is significant historically as
the only public building extant of more than 50 structures moved in an unprecedented fashion from the small town of Laclede to Dover. It is also significant architecturally as a rare example of a professionally designed Rustic style building in this North Idaho community.
In the early 1920s A. C. White commissioned one of Spokane's leading architectural firms, Whitehouse and Price, to design a new summer cottage on the Pend Oreille River near Laclede. The eight-room summer residence cost $8000 to build and replaced an earlier cottage the family had used on the same site. The building's conventional design was made to look rustic by the use of cedar bark for the exterior siding material. This bark can be removed in large pieces easily from dead trees and proves to be a very durable material. It is readily available in North Idaho but is rarely seen on anything other than an occasional farm outbuilding. The rustic look of the White cottage was continued in the use of unpeeled cedar poles which form figure-four brackets at the roof corners and under a flower box.
A. C. White was a prominent lumber man in Bonner County. He moved to Laclede from Michigan in 1909, bringing with him many years of experience in the timber industry. The A. C. White Lumber company grew to include a mill, planer and a large sash and door factory. The economy of Laclede depended on these industries and it suffered a devastating blow on August 17, 1922, when a fire wiped out the mill, factory and yards. Residents remained hopeful that White would rebuild at Laclede but he announced that he was relocating to Dover where he planned to renovate and expand the idle Dover mill. As one woman wrote in her diary on September 1, 1922, "well the thunder bolt fell on Laclede. AC has decided to move to Dover. He bought the Dover Mill Plant, so I guess Laclede is dead."
What was a blow to one town was a boon to the other. White was soon hiring men to remodel the mill and to build dry kilns and a new sash and door factory, the largest in the Inland Empire and the only one in North Idaho. With so many workers flocking to Dover, White immediately realized the need for more housing. Since he owned close to 50 houses in Laclede and needed that many in Dover, he arranged to have them moved ten miles to his new location.
This was no ordinary move, however, for all of the buildings, including an 80-by-200 foot warehouse, were transported to their new sites by barge on the Pend Oreille River. The
American Lumberman called the move "an industrial feat of the first magnitude" and the local papers reported that the move was accomplished without even damage to plaster. Indeed, it was noted that before the jacks could be let down the families were moved in and smoke was coming out of the chimneys.
White's summer cottage was one of the last buildings to be moved, not coming upriver until late June or July 1923. It was moved in three sections and rejoined at its new site. The White family had never used it as their summer home since it was not quite finished when the mill burned. They evidently did not need a vacation home once they had moved to Dover, so they gave the building to the town for use as a church. Whitehouse and Price designed the alterations in 1923 and later that year the Community Baptist Church held services in their new building, with Reverend A. F. White as pastor. The church building, along with the school- house, became a focus for the small community.
While the church remains nearly unaltered to this day, the town of Dover has changed a great deal. Hard times hit the town ca. 1930 when White's mill closed down. An unknown number of houses were barged further upriver to Sandpoint and the company store closed. The economy has gone up and down since then, depending on the status of the mill. But the town is no longer a self-sufficient entity. The church is the only one of the original public buildings extant; the store, school and pool hall are gone, the post office moved up to the highway, and the fire station replaced with a new metal building. The houses no longer form a cohesive group representative of the ones moved from Laclede; about half of the older homes have been altered, with additions, new siding or changed windows, and a scattering of newer homes breaks the unity. The Dover church remains as a lone symbol of a town and time that few people remember today.
From the NRHP Registration Form