Dalkena was a logging town and what a logging town it was. Up until the 1930s a busy railroad station handled hundreds of passengers and millions of board feet of lumber to be shipped. The old river pilings protruding from the Pend Oreille River are witnesses to the many log booms that once supplied local mills for decades.

Two Great Lakes lumber men, Henry Dalton, and Hugh Kennedy, choose a small community that was called Glencoe as the townsite for a new company town. They constructed a large sawmill and called it "Dalkena" as the name, a combination of the first syllables of their own names.

Dalkena consisted of mill offices, two bunkhouses, cookhouse, and general store. Surveyors laid out three city blocks to handle businesses and homes.