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Alpine, Wyoming/Idaho

Alpine was a small community located on the border of Wyoming and Idaho. John Booth, who arrived in the Grand Valley area in the 1890s, ran a ferry at Alpine, and early settlers arrived in 1907. A post office opened in 1911 or so, and a white frame schoolhouse was built around 1916, but closed in 1928. The town boasted a baseball team, hot springs, grocery store, dance hall, cafè, and two bars owned by Earl Ford—one on the Idaho side and one on the Wyoming side. When the Bureau of Reclamation arrived to start preparations for Palisades Dam, some Alpine residents resisted the incursion: a member of the Berchtold family, who owned Alpine’s first water rights, destroyed a BOR water tank when the agency started filling it without his consent. Government trucks later flattened his barley crop. The above photograph shows the Civilian Conservation Corps barracks in Alpine, which were used to house the workers who built a road connecting Alpine to Jackson Hole in the 1930s.