Stand at the corner of Bank Street and Sixth Street in downtown Wallace and look down. Set into the pavement is a handsome metal cover, cast like a manhole lid, bearing a compass rose, the figure of a miner, and a declaration no other town on earth can match: "The Center of the Universe — Wallace, Idaho." It is exactly what it claims to be, and Wallace has the paperwork to prove it.
On September 25, 2004, Mayor Ron Garitone issued a proclamation that began, "I, Ron Garitone, Mayor of Wallace, Idaho, and all of its subjects, and being of sound body and mind, do hereby solemnly declare and proclaim Wallace to be the Center of the Universe." The proclamation noted that government-contracted scientists had, after years of diligence, been unable to unearth one scintilla of evidence that Wallace is not the Center of the Universe. The town has rested its case ever since.
The reasoning has a name: probabilism. The idea was hatched among a group of friends gathered at a local bar on the very corner where the marker now sits. One of the group, Shauna Hillman, director of the Northern Pacific Depot Railroad Museum, describes herself as the official janitor of the Center of the Universe. Probabilism, as Wallace practices it, is simple and airtight: if something cannot be proven false, then it must be true. No scientist, surveyor, or skeptic has ever disproven Wallace's claim, and until one does, the claim stands.
Behind the joke, though, was a serious fight. Wallace sits in the middle of the Bunker Hill Superfund site, and in 2002 the Environmental Protection Agency greatly expanded the cleanup boundary, from about twenty-one square miles to roughly fifteen hundred, sweeping in the whole Silver Valley. Residents believed the agency's reasoning treated contamination as presumed until proven otherwise, and the designation hammered property values and pride alike. Garitone, a retired miner, answered by borrowing the government's own logic and turning it cheerfully around. If Wallace had to prove a negative to the satisfaction of federal scientists, then the world could just as well try to prove one to Wallace. The proclamation was a thumb in the eye, delivered with a grin and television cameras invited.
The marker itself honors the industry that built the town. Around its rim, beside the compass points, are the initials of four great mining companies of the Coeur d'Alene district: HL for Hecla Mining, CDE for Coeur d'Alene Mines, SRLM for Sterling Mining, and BHM for the Bunker Hill Mining Company. At its center a miner leans into his drill atop a star. The choice of symbols was fitting for a town that had long called itself the Silver Capital of the World, standing in a valley that has produced more than a billion ounces of silver since the 1880s.
Two decades on, the Center of the Universe has become Wallace's signature. Visitors make a small pilgrimage to stand with both feet on the exact center of everything and take the required photograph, while locals treat the whole affair with the straight face it deserves. The proclamation has never been rescinded, the marker has never been moved, and no scintilla of contrary evidence has yet been unearthed. Wallace, Idaho, population well under a thousand, remains — by its own unassailable logic — the Center of the Universe, and everything else is just the outskirts.
Photo: The Center of the Universe marker at Bank Street and Sixth Street in Wallace. Photo by Jan Kronsell, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.