See The Magic Valley Now vs Decades Ago in these 4 Comparison Pictures

Since I didn't grow up in Idaho, I don't know what Twin Falls and the rest of the Magic Valley looked like back in the day. I've seen a lot of change in the decade I have lived here and I've seen some old black-and-white pictures of areas and buildings around town that show what the city looked like decades ago.

Pictures Show Drastic Changes in Twin Falls Over Time

There's a new website that takes user-submitted black-and-white pictures and places them over the current look of town to give you an idea of how much things have really changed. Some of the pictures I've seen shared online help you understand why streets and areas have the names they do.

On the website What Was There, they take some of these pictures and place them over the current Google Street pictures. You can then fade the pictures in and out to see what changes have happened.

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The pictures include the 1913 Twin Falls High School across the street from the courthouse, the 1916 Washington High School, and Downtown Twin Falls in 1941.

I didn't know about the original Twin Falls High School. Apparently, it made it until 1980 before it was torn down. The Washington School is pretty hard to imagine now too since that area is packed with businesses including Albertson's and Jimmy John's. More about both schools can be found in articles from the Times-News.

Another interesting find on the What Was There site is a few pictures from 1942 and 1943 of the Minidoka Relocation Camp during World War 2. More than 9,000 Japanese-American citizens were forced to live in these camps during the war. The location is now a National Historic Site.