Poet honors Kootenai County Courthouse for America250 celebration

Jennifer Passaro’s America250 poem placed the Kootenai County Courthouse, the 1925-26 landmark at 501 Government Way, at the center of Coeur d’Alene’s semiquincentennial observance. The piece, written by the inaugural Coeur d’Alene Poet Laureate for 2024-2027, treated the courthouse as more than a public building and turned it into the story’s main symbol of endurance and local memory.

That symbolism matched the gathering on the east lawn of the courthouse on July 3, 2026, where Kootenai County and the City of Coeur d’Alene held a joint America250 celebration. Event materials said the occasion marked America’s 250th birthday, the courthouse’s 100th anniversary and Idaho’s statehood, with Idaho Supreme Court Justice Cynthia Meyer listed as keynote speaker. The program also included a 1926 time-capsule unveiling and a 2026 time-capsule burial, bringing a century-old civic object back into public view just ahead of the Fourth of July.

The courthouse itself carries the kind of history the poem leaned into. Designed by Spokane architect Julius A. Zittle, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places on Dec. 23, 1977. Its bricks, windows and symmetrical front have long made it one of the county’s most recognizable buildings, but the poem framed those features as part of a larger civic record, one shaped by defendants, jurors, staff and residents who have passed through the building over generations.

Passaro’s work also widened the lens beyond Kootenai County. The poem connected the courthouse to the broader American story of settlement and immigration, suggesting that local institutions grew out of a country built by newcomers as well as founders. That gave the patriotic occasion an inclusive tone, one rooted in place rather than abstraction and in the daily workings of county government rather than national mythology.

The city’s Poet Laureate program was created to produce poems reflective of local landscapes, social situations or important events, and the courthouse tribute fit that mission closely. Walter Burns, chair of the Coeur d’Alene Historical Preservation Commission, said the building matters not only for its stately architecture but for the story it tells about early Coeur d’Alene and Kootenai County. The time-capsule reveal and the poem together underscored the same idea: in this county, patriotism still gathers around a courthouse, a lawn and the public memory they hold.