Ramsdell, Idaho — Station Name Beside Benewah Lake

Ramsdell sits near Benewah Lake and Parkline on the Coeur d'Alene Reservation, in a landscape where wetlands, forest, farms and open water crowd together.

Older maps also call the place Ramsdell Station. The name is a small surviving clue to an era when rail transportation gave tiny settlements a reason to appear on timetables even if they never developed much of a downtown.

The setting has outlasted the station. Chatcolet Lake, Benewah Lake and the lower St. Joe system create a complicated watery landscape nearby, while rural homes occupy the drier ground between reservation land and the lakes.

Ramsdell is still a very small place, and writing it as anything else would miss what is interesting about it. A transportation name survived after the transportation system changed, attached to a handful of households in one of northern Idaho's strangest lake-and-wetland landscapes.