Sandpoint, with a national reputation as an arts community, eased into its new role slowly. In 1963, a small group of people put on a pageant to celebrate Idaho’s territorial centennial. “That’s when we first found out how much talent was around here,” remembered Hazel Hall. About the same time, the Sandpoint Center for Arts and Crafts opened on First Avenue. “We had dancing and piano lessons, and art lessons of different kinds, and knitting, and a little poetry reading. And then the city bought a kiln for us for making pottery.”
The local theater got a boost a couple of years ago when “a group of professional actors came up from San Francisco and formed a summer theater company using a lot of local people,” Marilyn Sabella recalled. “We did Shakespeare, we did Glass Menagerie, we did musicals. [The productions] were really pretty good!”
