New Plymouth




The Idaho Encyclopedia
By Vardis Fisher, State Director
Compiled by the Federal Writer's Project of the Works Progress Administration, 1938
Page 401 - 402

New Plymouth (2,256 alt.; 510 population). In the central part of Payette County, 13 miles southeast of the town of Payette. New Plymouth was the outcome of a National Irrigation Congress held in Denver in 1894. The idea of the Congress was to promote irrigation projects and to illustrate the feasibility of making small farming communities in arid lands. The executive committee, after visiting arid regions of eight states, selected the Payette Valley of Idaho and returned to the East to enlist settlers for the enterprise. A number of prominent men in Boston quickly became enthusiastic advocates of the movement, and they, with others from the East and Middle West, assembled in Chicago in March, 1895, and organized themselves as a nucleus of the new settlement. In eight weeks they had a membership of 250 heads of families, and in September of that year they came West and established New Plymouth.

The town itself is laid out on the auditorium plan; the suburb boundary lots are one acre each, and farther out the small acreage plots are from 10 to 40 acres each. The first farming was done in the spring of 1896. Provision is made also for parks and public buildings to be placed between the larger plats and the business section of the town. Situated on US 30 and the UP RR (Union Pacific Railroad).

In one of the important fruit-growing sections of Idaho, New Plymouth has several large packing houses, and ships hundreds of cars of apples, prunes, cherries, pears, peaches, plums, grapes, and vegetables each year. Grains are also grown in the valley. New Plymouth supports a newspaper, the Payette Valley Sentinel, a public high school and grade building, several stores, and a bank. When the people of the town settled in their new homes, they voted to have only one community church, and although no member of the Congregational Church was present, they selected that denomination. There are now four other churches.





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