Potlatch Theater

Joe Vogel on April 20, 2012 at 3:31 am

Potlatch, Idaho, was founded in 1905 by the Potlatch Corporation, a large lumber company. As a company town, Potlatch was fitted out with an array of public facilities, including an opera house. The opera house burned in 1917, according to one source, and was replaced by a house called the People’s Theatre. It’s possible that the People’s Theatre was the same house that became the Potlatch Theatre, but I’ve been unable to confirm this. I’m inclined to think that it was, though, as Potlatch was never very large, and its population has been diminishing for several decades. It’s unlikely that a new theater would have been built in the post-war period.

The original opera house had been designed by a Spokane architect named C. Ferris White, who designed virtually all of the early buildings in the city, but I’ve been unable to discover if he was still the company’s architect in the late 1910s, when the new theater would have been built. White practiced in Spokane as late as 1922, so it is possible that he designed the People’s Theatre.