Hayden author’s local history book joins NIC library collection

Barbara Bennett’s Ordinary People, Extraordinary Lives has found a permanent home in North Idaho College’s Molstead Library, turning one Hayden native’s family-history project into a public record that more Kootenai County readers can now reach.

Bennett is 94 and grew up in Hayden without knowing why Hayden and Hayden Lake carried those names. That childhood question eventually led her to Matthew Hayden, the Mat Hayden homestead west of Honeysuckle Beach in the 1870s, and to the local folklore that a seven-up card game decided who would name the lake.

The book is the first volume in a series documenting the families and history of the Hayden area. Bennett spent more than a decade collecting stories from Hayden’s oldest families, and the project was originally commissioned about 15 years ago by the Hayden Historic Preservation Commission. Kootenai County Genealogical Society supported the library event, reflecting its own mission of gathering and preserving genealogical and historical data.

The addition matters because Bennett’s work captures the kind of local memory that can disappear quietly. Her book gathers family histories and neighborhood stories that might otherwise remain in scrapbooks, oral recollections or club archives, making them part of a collection that can be preserved, taught and shared long after the people who told those stories are gone.

Mary Ortman, the library’s tech and digital services librarian, said the library was glad to add Bennett’s work to the collection and noted that the Molstead Library is open to the public. The library is at 875 W. Garden Ave. in Coeur d’Alene, and North Idaho College says community members can use it as well as students. Residents age 18 and older in five northern Idaho counties can qualify for a community borrower card, and community members can also use the library with a physical borrower card or driver’s license.

For Hayden, the book adds another layer to a city that says it was incorporated on June 27, 1955 and was once known as Hayden Village. County and museum history also trace the area’s early life through homesteads, agriculture and rail access, including by 1890 when settlers were growing legumes, wheat, oats, hay and fruit orchards, and by 1906 when the Inland Empire Railroad electric line reached the Bozanta Tavern.

With Bennett’s book now in the NIC collection, Hayden’s local history has moved beyond private memory and into a place where more of North Idaho can find it, check it out and carry it forward.