DOVER — Community residents will celebrate both the area's rich heritage and the country's 250th birthday this weekend as the city hosts the Dover Heritage Festival on Saturday.

From loggers in action to a community memorial wall telling Dover's stories, the festival offers something for everyone, Dover officials said.

"This will be a fun, family-oriented event to honor our nation's 250th birthday and also to celebrate our local history," Dover Mayor Keith Congleton said.

The festival begins at 9 a.m. at Dover City Beach with events ongoing until 3 p.m. Loggers will showcase their skills, and youngsters will have a chance to see what the industry is about at a mini-logging event created especially for them. There will also be rock painting, the community memorial wall to capture the community's history, stories and people, and both food options and vendors.

Parking will be available at Festival Field at the end of Railroad Avenue (next to the water treatment plant), with a wagon transport available to shuttle guests to Dover City Beach.

The first mention of the Pend Oreille River, on whose banks Dover sits, was in 1809, when explorer, fur trader, and mapmaker David Thompson made his first trip down the river. Those documents are the first known historical documents on the Kalispel Tribe, Sue Bache said during a 2023 walk held to commemorate Dover's centennial.

However, it wasn't until 1883, when the Northern Pacific Railroad built a track on the north side of the river, that communities like Dover and Laclede began. In 1906, Dr. O.S. Welty and several investors purchased the land on which Dover now sits and started a mill. Originally named Welty, the town's name was changed to Dover in 1910 to honor the residents' collective roots in Canal Dover, Ohio.

Downriver, A.C. White purchased land three years later and started his own mill after moving from Michigan. The site quickly grew to include a mill, a planer, a large sash and door factory, and blocks of employee housing.

However, in August 1922 — two years after the Dover mill closed and 13 years after his mill opened — a devastating fire broke out at White's Laclede facility, burning the mill to the ground and taking with it an estimated 1 million board feet of manufactured Western white pine of the finest grade, Bache said.

After debating what to do — whether to rebuild the mill in Laclede and barge what he could salvage upriver to Dover, or take over Welty's mill — White made his decision. A few weeks after the fire, he would move his operations northeast to Dover.

Plans were made to move the buildings upriver to Dover, noted in the American Lumbermen publication as an "industrial feat of the first magnitude," she told the crowd, adding the move was a complete success.

That history, and the country's 250th anniversary, will both be celebrated Saturday at the Dover Heritage Festival.

For more information, call Dover City Hall at 208-265-8339 or email [email protected].