Tucked away in the Magic Valley of Idaho, along the Snake River, you’ll find the second largest Wendell in the United States, behind only our own hometown.

Called the Hub City of the Magic Valley, Wendell, Idaho, population 2,800, will celebrate its centennial next year.

The town was actually a planned community created by an industrialist named W.S. Kuhn, who owned Twin Falls North Side Land & Water Co.

Kuhn named the town for his son Wendel. A neighboring town, called Jerome is also named for one of Kuhn’s sons.

And like the town in Massachusetts, folks in Wendell, Idaho, pronounce their town like the poet, with the emphasis on the first syllable.

Police chief Kirtus Gaston is like walking Chamber of Commerce billboard for the town.

He said the town was safe enough that people could go to bed at night without locking their doors.

That’s a pretty interesting comment coming from a police chief.

Wendell, Idaho is a farming community, but they don’t raise what you might expect. Dairy is big business in

Wendell, Idaho, not potatoes.

In addition to the farmers and cows which produce the milk, Wendell, Idaho is also home to a couple milk processing plants.

And just as Wendell, N.C., celebrates its tobacco heritage during the Harvest Festival, Wendell, Idaho, also celebrates his agricultural heritage with a two-day festival called Dairy Days.

One year recently, Gaston told me, the theme was Holy Cow!

That’s cute. Maybe Wendell, N.C. needs to copy its brethren from the west and come up with a really cool theme for each year’s Harvest Festival.

Wendell, Idaho is in what Gaston called the high desert. It’s about 3,200 feet above sea level, but it looks like it’s on the edge of a great big desert.

Temperatures range from 110 degrees in the summer to 20 below zero in the winter. Yikes! The good news for the folks in Wendell, Idaho is that the humidity is only in the teens.

It just so happened that Gaston knew a little bit about the humidity of these parts because he recently spent some time in Raleigh attending a homeland security conference.

He didn’t realize he was so close to our Wendell, he said, or he might have made a side trip.

But he said he was impressed by the forests he saw, noting that, in Wendell, Idaho, one can see for miles without seeing anything.

Like any good small town, Wendell, Idaho has a central place to go get all the gossip.

Dan Becker has owned the Pit Stop – part convenience store, part diner – for the past year or so.

Gaston reckons someone could sit in the Pit Stop for half an hour or so and know everything that’s going on in town.

Sound like Aubrey’s and Peedie’s Grill to you? Becker says the town is strictly a working man’s town. “There’s no white collar here,” Becker said.

Like our Wendell, the Idaho town is experiencing substantial growth as people try to flee the urban areas of Twin Falls, 20 miles away.

Gaston estimates that the town has grown more than 20 percent since the 2000 census. Every year the town sees between 150 and 200 new home starts.

Managing that growth is the town’s biggest challenge (Gee, where have we heard that before?) and it may have led to Becker’s comment that Wendell, Idaho is “an old-style small town that’s having a hard time catching up.”

Next week: Wendell, Minnesota.