McCall City Jail

McCall City Jail. , The McCall City Jail was built for $650 in June, 1930, directly behind the City Hall located on the corner of Lenora and Third Streets. The City Hall building was later moved 12 miles to Roseberry, ID, leaving the jail as a sole reminder of earlier times. Meagerly furnished with a parlor stove, a washbasin, an iron bunk for each of two cells and a few blankets, the jail mostly house drunkards. When the new jail was built in Cascade in the early 1970s the McCall jail was abandoned. , Forty years earlier, Tom and Louisa McCall and family settled on the south shore of Payette Lake. Other homesteaders, Elba York, Lewis Heacock, John Cox, Mark Cole, and Albert Gaekel, soon joined them and a community began to take shape. In those early days Tom McCall appropriated the abandoned Lardo U.S. Post Office, originally located 10 miles south near Roseberry, and the south shore area was briefly known as “Lardo.” In 1903 the Lardo P.O. was moved across the river to Boydstun’s store. Two years later Tom McCall had a four-block section from his homestead surveyed for a town site and began selling lots, setting aside two lots for a school and the Congregational Church, still located at the corner of First and Park Streets. Honoring Tom as the father of the town, citizens changed the name to “McCall.” The town was officially incorporated on July 19, 1911. , Four overlapping elements: recreation, mining, forestry and commerce, have shaped the development of McCall, making it the economic hub for central Idaho. For over sixty years Carl Brown’s lumber mill was the center and economic life force for its citizens. The presence of the Civilian Conservation Corps and filming of the MGM move, “Northwest Passage,” were highlights of the Depression and pre-war years. , The original village of McCall lies in a natural amphitheater with the glorious Payette Lake, alpine valleys and mountains for a stage. Generations of residents and visitors have found solace and inspiration on these shores.