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• 1 2020-01-20T17:54:56-08:00 Introduction and Overview 32 An Introduction plain 2022-11-22T07:59:04-08:00

  The Boise Bench is a popular collection of suburban neighborhood districts in Boise, Idaho.  Late nineteenth century irrigation efforts reclaimed land that had been considered a wasteland in 1863 when Boise was first founded. By the end of the century a growing agricultural presence developed there, becoming small rural villages, and then mid-century suburbs that were largely annexed by Boise City in the 1960s.  Despite the neighborhood’s longevity and popularity, historians have tended to overlook the Bench as a topic of serious inquiry, perhaps because they saw nothing out of the ordinary to discuss. Residents were working class farmers and tradesmen, they kept very little of their own records, and excepting the canal, until the mid Twentieth Century, the bench held little to draw the attention of the celebrated Idaho History authors.  It was only when the mid-century suburbanization began to accelerate that the rural and pastoral residents began to look back in order to capture a history that they felt was being ‘lost’ to modern development. This project looks at the various stages of growth on the Boise Bench and highlights a succession of federal policies that were responsible for appropriating, coordinating, and supporting the kind of growth and development that took place on Boise’s wild outskirts.  

  The term “bench” was used by earliest settlers to refer to the plateaus rising out of the Boise River bottom. However, “the Bench” specifically refers to the growth centering around the Franklin and Whitney Bench neighborhoods on the first and second plateaus south of Boise’s historic city center, encompassing neighborhoods from Federal Way west, between the Boise Depot and the airport, in the space contained by the path of Interstate 84 to the south, and not extending much farther than Cole Road to the west. 

  The Boise Bench History Project (BBHP) presents a collection of historical narratives to accompany a curated selection of primary materials and other historical ephemera in the collections at the Idaho State Archives, Boise State Special Collections, the National Archives, the Bureau of Land Management’s General Land Office, and local periodicals and personal collections. As a digital public history project, the BBHP encompasses both academic and popular history. This is a digital exhibition, where users can explore the transition of the built environment to better understand the influence of local, national, and international events on settlement patterns from the late Territorial period through the post-war era. 

  While much of the development that is familiar to us today took place in the mid-twentieth century, the Bench was first redefined by the Geological Survey conducted by the United States government in the late 1860s. This USGS survey determined the land grid to which our streets, lots, and entire neighborhoods conform.  Not only does it provide the structure for future growth, it also captures traces of the systems that predated even the USGS land grid.  On the survey of Boise City (1868), you can see how the old Boise City & Owyhee Stage Line cuts diagonally across the bench lands, through the planned regularity of the Township and Range grid, while you can observe the major Bench streets of Overland, Orchard, Franklin, Vista, Emerald, Fairview, Curtis, and Cole all conform to the USGS land grid.  

  The 1868 survey map serves as a significant snapshot in time because it captures the fundamental process of national expansion into the western United States, popularly known as the American Frontier. The 1868 map represents the first application of property rights that determines our land exchanges still today, and thus it conveniently and productively dictates the basis and confines of my project. On principle, then, my history finds its origins in the Late Frontier period, even while much of the familiar bench aesthetic and existing architecture originates in the mid twentieth century. And so BBHP serves as an essential contribution to the written historical narrative, bridging our understanding of Boise’s frontier establishment and its post-war metropolitan suburbanization.  

  This project exhibits content that spans nearly one hundred years, between 1870 and 1964. Because of the large time period, the project identifies three distinct “eras,” or periods of development that share underlying ideologies, organizational theories, technologies, and outwardly visible styles or expressions of growth that are identifiable today. For each era—1870 to 1900, 1900 to 1930, and 1930 to 1964— three to five points of interest illustrate and expand the contextual overview by identifying persons, places, styles, and other factors that have influenced Bench culture and neighborhood development.

  Overall, the BBHP examines how environmental conditions and regional accessibility of the Boise Valley made it a natural oasis and gathering point for indigenous peoples and immigrant travelers alike, and how later settlement was shaped and influenced by national ideas of land ownership; by transportation networks and technological advancements; by Territorial, State and Federal policies; and by the prevailing national fashions and popular culture.  The BBHP provides an essential historical context for the development and annexation of the Franklin and Whitney Bench for current and future Bench residents, business owners, developers, and city planners in their efforts to build livable places in relation to their local history.  Presented as a cohesive narrative within the context of a public history project, this history illustrates how, between the late frontier and the post-war periods, the Franklin and Whitney neighborhoods became an integrated southern residential anchor to Idaho’s capital city.
  
  © Angie K. Davis 2020