St. Joseph’s Catholic Church was designed by the architects Tourtelotte and Hummel and built in 1928 in the town of Elk River. Elk River lost much of its population by 1933 when the Clearwater Timber Company closed. The original Catholic Church was lost to fire around that time and the Elk River Church was moved to accommodate the larger congregation. For sixty years St. Joseph’s was a mission church of Potlatch. The priest lived in Potlatch and traveled to Bovill to celebrate mass. The church closed in 1993 and was purchased and renovated to serve as the Bovill Library. The Bovill project was the first to receive proceeds from an endowment created by Washington Water Power, now AVISTA Corporation, to benefit preservation projects in their service area.