Included in the city hall were a new police station and jail. More or less art deco in style, the low, single story building is faced with buff colored brick with contrasting bricks sprinkled about. The words CITY HALL are embedded above the entrance and there is a granite date stone in the north elevation near the east corner.
The town hall and police station both remain in use by the town after 77 years.
As best we can tell, the "then" photo here was taken around 1940. The front car in the 1940s photo looks to be something like a 1938 Pontiac. The "now" photo was taken on April 27th, 2014.
Idaho and other western states benefited extensively from New Deal programs during the depression of the 1930s. The state's economy had faltered long before this, however. Encouraged by high prices and a feeling of patriotism, agriculture, mining, and the timber industry all expanded during World War I. The brief boom was followed by collapse, however, and Idaho headed into depression by 1921, never regaining strength before the even more severe depression hit in the next decade. Federal expenditures of $321 million between 1933 and 1939 helped Idaho on the road to recovery; nearly $23 million of this went to the WPA.
Close to eighty schools in Idaho were built with funds expended mostly by the Works Progress Administration. By early 1939, the northern Idaho towns of Cataldo, Hayden Lake, Osburn, Plummer, and Rathdrum had new schools; Bonners Ferry, Clark Fork, and Post Falls paid for school additions; and Kellogg and Sagle schools built new gymnasiums. 2 The federal agency changed its name to Work Projects Administration in 1939 and continued to fund a variety of construction projects until it shut down in 1943.
Bonner County, with its dependence on the timber industry, faced hard times during the depression. Like neighboring towns, Priest River became well acquainted with federal aid programs.
In addition to thirteen CCC camps operating in western Bonner County, the town received money to construct a new city hall. 3 A few years later, when faced with the need for a new high school, residents once again turned to Washington, D. C. for help. A federal grant of $32,000, matched by $58,000 from a local bond election in October 1939, gave patrons of Independent School District No. 13 the opportunity to construct a new school, one with adequate classroom space for manual arts and home economics programs deemed necessary for high school students.
From the Idaho Historical Society