In Kendrick, the Whole Summer Runs on Buildings That Used to Be Something Else

The pool opens at eleven most July mornings, and by noon the parking lot has more Latah County plates from outside Kendrick than from inside it. Families drive over from Juliaetta, Troy, Deary, and Lapwai because the Kendrick War Memorial Pool is the only one for miles that still has a diving board and enough lifeguards on staff to run lessons, lap swim, and a birthday party at the same time. The city's own recreation page puts it plainly: the pool is a major draw for the summer months, and not just for the roughly 313 people who live in Kendrick proper. It was built as a memorial, not a municipal amenity, which is easy to forget until you notice there's no plaque explaining why a town this size bothered with a diving board at all.

That's the thread that runs under most of a Kendrick summer Saturday. The places that carry the day aren't new attractions built for tourists. They're old buildings that got repurposed and, in most cases, kept the bones of whatever they used to be.

A hardware store that still gets used the same way

Walk two blocks up from the pool to Main Street and you'll find Hardware Brewing Co., which is exactly what it sounds like: a working brewpub inside the old Kendrick Hardware Store. Christine and Doug Lohman opened it in the spring of 2020, in the middle of the state's COVID shutdown order, which made the opening itself local news at the time. The building still does what a hardware store on a small-town Main Street is supposed to do. It's the place you go for something specific, except now the specific thing is a beer garden, shuffleboard, and an all-day espresso counter instead of nails and paint.

What throws people is the food. The menu reads like standard brewpub fare, burgers, fish and chips, a Sunday special board, but the dish locals actually talk about is the chimichanga plate, built around frijoles de la olla made from what one diner described as "a recipe of her mother's that had been in the family for generations." It's not the kind of thing you expect to find on a menu next to a beer called Red Nail Ale, in a converted hardware store, in a town of a few hundred people. That contradiction is part of why it works. Nobody drives in for the concept. They drive in because the food is better than the building lets on.

Nine acres of buildings still doing their original job

Keep walking and you're standing inside the Kendrick Downtown Historic District without any sign telling you so. The National Register nomination for the district covers roughly nine acres and thirty-four total resources, twenty-two of them contributing buildings that date from 1904 up through about 1960. More than 63 percent of those buildings served a commercial function when they went up, and most still do. The district grew up as a regional railroad market center at the turn of the twentieth century, squeezed into the narrow flat ground between the Potlatch River and the steep grade rising north of town, which is why Main Street runs the way it does and why the storefronts still line up shoulder to shoulder instead of spreading out the way a newer town would.

The nomination paperwork also notes something easy to miss on a casual walk: many of the storefronts were modernized after World War II, but the original window openings and spatial layouts underneath the newer facades were mostly left intact. In practice that means the building housing Hardware Brewing, and most of its neighbors, are wearing a mid-century face over a much older frame.

A speakeasy door that leads to World War I relics, not bootleg gin

One flight up inside the old Fraternal Temple Building on East Main Street, the Kendrick Museum keeps its own kind of contradiction going. You enter through what Visit Idaho describes as the "speakeasy" doors of the museum, a detail that makes you expect prohibition-era mischief. What's actually on the other side is a military display built around World War I relics, along with an exhibit on the small ghost towns that used to dot the ridges around Kendrick, Juliaetta, Leland, and the surrounding ridges the Juliaetta-Kendrick Heritage Foundation still catalogs. The door promises one story. The room tells a different, older one.

The depot that shaped the whole town before it ever ran a train

Head down toward the river and you'll pass the Kendrick Depot on Railroad Street, sitting quietly next to the trailhead most people associate with the Ed Corkill Memorial Trail. The depot's real significance predates the building itself. Thomas Kirby founded Kendrick's post office in 1889, then struck a deal with Northern Pacific Railroad, deeding half of the original 240-acre townsite in exchange for a guarantee the railroad would extend its line into town. The first train reached Kendrick on February 4, 1891. That single transaction is the reason Kendrick's street grid, platted that same year, still runs the way it does, wedged tight between the river and the hillside because the railroad alignment along the river bank dictated where the commercial blocks could go.

A few hundred yards past the depot, the Kendrick RV Park sits along the Potlatch River itself, gravel and sand pads with 30 and 50 amp hookups, filling up fast enough year-round that the city recommends reserving ahead. It's the quietest stop on the map, and also the one closest to the water that actually made the rest of the town possible.

Once a year, the map gets rearranged completely

None of this holds in the spring, when the town's biggest annual event, the Locust Blossom Festival, takes over. The day starts with a color run at 8 a.m. and a parade at 10, complete with a flyover of vintage warbirds from Hangar 180. What follows is a straightforward small-town afternoon: a barbecue lunch, live music, a talent show, an egg toss, and a dunk tank that draws a line all day. For one weekend, the pool, the brewery, and Main Street all empty out into the same few blocks at the same time, and the quiet rhythm the rest of the summer runs on gets replaced by something louder and shorter. Then it settles back into the version of Kendrick that shows up every other Saturday from June through August: a pool that pulls in four other towns, a hardware store still doing its job under a different name, and a museum door built to promise one thing that opens onto something else entirely.

That's the version worth knowing if you already live here. The landmarks aren't new. They're just doing double duty, and most of what makes them worth a Saturday afternoon is the gap between what the building used to be and what it turned into.

If you're curious about more of what makes Kendrick and the rest of the Lewis-Clark Valley tick, from the towns just down the highway to the ones tucked into the canyon, Kiley Waldemarson keeps writing about the places she grew up around. Reach out anytime you want a local's read on the area, whether or not real estate is anywhere on your mind yet.