Looking for a good education? You might consider Purdue, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, or Cornell. They're all Ivy League universities, and they're all places in Idaho. All those sites are along the old Washington, Idaho, and Montana Railroad in north Idaho. You'll also find Wellesley, Vassar, and Stanford along the 47-mile-stretch of railroad.
The tradition of naming places along that route after colleges apparently started when railroad officials offered to name one site for a local man, Homer Canfield. He suggested they name the place Harvard, instead. An engineer named a siding Purdue, after his alma mater, and the die was cast. Students working summer jobs set about naming various sidings after their colleges.
Cambridge, Idaho, in Washington County, also owes its name to a railroad and Harvard University. Harvard was the alma mater of the president of the Pacific and Idaho Northern Railroad, and of course, Harvard is in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And what about Oxford? Surely that's a good choice to receive your advanced degree? In England, that's true, but in Idaho, Oxford is a site a few miles north of Preston. It wasn't named after the university at all. Oxford was named because some oxen forded the creek there.
You can learn something at any of these Idaho sites, but none of them, as far as I know, offer advanced degrees.
The tradition of naming places along that route after colleges apparently started when railroad officials offered to name one site for a local man, Homer Canfield. He suggested they name the place Harvard, instead. An engineer named a siding Purdue, after his alma mater, and the die was cast. Students working summer jobs set about naming various sidings after their colleges.
Cambridge, Idaho, in Washington County, also owes its name to a railroad and Harvard University. Harvard was the alma mater of the president of the Pacific and Idaho Northern Railroad, and of course, Harvard is in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
And what about Oxford? Surely that's a good choice to receive your advanced degree? In England, that's true, but in Idaho, Oxford is a site a few miles north of Preston. It wasn't named after the university at all. Oxford was named because some oxen forded the creek there.
You can learn something at any of these Idaho sites, but none of them, as far as I know, offer advanced degrees.
RSS Feed