Boise was founded on the Oregon Trail in 1863, shortly after the opening of Fort Boise, which was built to protect the gold that had recently been discovered in the Boise Basin around Idaho City. By the late 1800s, Boise had a very large downtown infrastructure, and it saw the addition of many multistoried buildings after 1900. In the late 1960s though the 1970s, Boise experienced a major urban renewal project with many of the historic buildings being torn down to make way for a new downtown mall. Since the 1970s, many new buildings have filled in the lots created by the urban renewal. This book will give readers an idea of what Boise once looked like.

Boise City was founded in 1863 when the US Army built a fort at the crossroads of the Oregon Trail and the road to the Boise Basin gold mines. By 1890, with the development of agriculture and the expansion of the railroad, towns stretched west along the Boise River to the Oregon border. A boom in the early 20th century was due in part to the electric railway, a modern transportation system linking Boise to the communities of Meridian, Eagle, Nampa, Caldwell and Middleton. The electric railway era lasted from 1891 to 1928.