When the Hospital Came Floating Across the Lake

After the war, Farragut Naval Base on the south side of Lake Pend Oreille started closing down — and with it, row after row of solidly built military barracks and offices sat empty. But up in Sandpoint, the old Page Hospital was crumbling, and the town needed something better. So what did they do? They floated the solution. Literally. Entire buildings were carefully dismantled, loaded onto barges, and floated across the lake to Sandpoint, where they were rebuilt into what would become the new hospital. No big government grant, no headlines — just local grit and ingenuity. It was the kind of thing you could only pull off here, where people still believed in rolling up their sleeves and making things happen.