A single female boarding house (an early twentieth-century euphemism for brothel) shared the block with the original jail in 1912. Set back from the street, the small ten-by-ten-foot wood-framed jail had only enough room for a single cell—which may have been adequate to control disorder in early Troy. In 1916, however, the population jumped from 300 to 700 when the Snowstorm Mining Company started extracting lead, zinc, and silver for use in World War I. Before the mining company arrived, Troy was a “beautiful town,” according to Jesse Walters, wife of Snowstorm’s superintendent. After 1916, however, Troy became “a boom town with the usual drunks, prostitutes, even a murder or two…” By 1926, 1,300 people lived in Troy, mostly single miners, sawyers, and railroad workers. Four brothels bordered the jail, which served as a barrier between the red light district and the more respectable blocks of Troy’s main street. In 1917, a suspicious fire started at the jail, killing its only prisoner, union organizer Frank Thornton, detained for “creating a disturbance.” The City of Troy repaired its jail, which continued to serve the community—however inadequately—until 1924. That year the city contracted with local builder D. E. Crissey to construct a new fire-resistant twenty-by-forty-foot jail from reinforced concrete. Barred windows and the words stamped beneath a bracketed cornice make the building’s function clear, as does the almost complete absence of windows to the side and rear of the building. Three jail cells, an exposed primitive toilet, and bare hanging light bulbs define the interior.
]]>Before Libby Dam tamed the river, the Kootenai became "a death dealing torrent in high water time." Raging currents regularly shut down ferries, stranding supplies intended for logging and mining camps and keeping north side children from their school across the river. The lack of roads and bridges also stymied economic development. Proper infrastructure, area boosters claimed, would bring both more settlers and automobile tourists en route to Glacier National Park. Voters concurred, passing a $125,000 bond measure in 1911 to improve roads and construct bridges at Libby, Troy, and Rexford. The Coast Bridge Company of Portland, Oregon, won the contract for all three bridges and within weeks a crew of engineers arrived in Libby. Work stopped, however, when Eureka residents, possibly angry over not getting their own bridge, filed an injunction to halt construction. Bridge and road contracts provided notorious opportunities for graft, but in this case the court found no wrongdoing. Construction resumed in June, and on December 17, 1912, the Troy Bridge (later renamed after President Theodore Roosevelt) opened to traffic. "The bridge is the best of its kind," crowed a local newspaper. "Two spans, with a middle pier, and is perfect in every respect." In fact, the bridge's Parker through-truss design was well-suited for the location. The rigid triangle trusses provided the structural stability needed to span the wide river, and the pre-manufactured rolled steel beams made on-site assembly relatively simple. Of the three Kootenai valley bridges to share the standardized design, this is the only one still standing.
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