Of all the buildings in Wallace, the one travelers remember best may be the one built for travelers. The Northern Pacific Depot, with its brick first story, its stuccoed second story, and its storybook turret, has stood at the north end of Sixth Street since the first years of the twentieth century, and for most of that time, it was Wallace's front door.
Railroads reached the Coeur d'Alene mining district in 1887, and rails made the Silver Valley. Ore and bullion rolled out of the canyons, while timber, machinery, food, and people rolled in. Wallace, the county seat and commercial center of the district, needed a station worthy of its ambitions, and the Northern Pacific Railway gave it one.
The depot was constructed in 1901 and opened for business in 1902. It followed Northern Pacific plan number 281-1, a standard design the railroad gave a distinctly grand treatment in the chateau style: cut-stone banding at the foundation, brick below, stuccoed concrete above, and a conical turret that still turns heads. Even its materials tell a Silver Valley story. The bricks were made by Gladding, McBean of Lincoln, California, originally for the Olympian Hotel in Tacoma, the Northern Pacific's western terminus, and some of the concrete was made with mine tailings.
For decades, the depot's platform was where Wallace began and ended its journeys. Miners arrived looking for work in the Gem, the Frisco, and the Hercules. Traveling salesmen stepped off with sample cases, families reunited under the turret, and the telegraph office wired the town's triumphs and tragedies to the outside world. The depot tied Wallace to Spokane and, through the Northern Pacific's main line, to the whole continent.
The railroad era slowly faded as highways and trucks took over, and the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976, while it was still in operation. Then, in the 1980s, the depot faced the same threat as the rest of downtown: Interstate 90. The planned viaduct needed the ground where the depot stood.
Wallace's answer, as with the town itself, was to move the landmark rather than lose it. On May 10, 1986, the Idaho Transportation Department moved the entire brick depot about 200 feet, across the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River, to its present site. The department then restored the building to the Secretary of the Interior's standards and donated it to the City of Wallace.
Today the depot is the Northern Pacific Depot Railroad Museum. Inside, visitors step into a re-created working station, complete with a telegraph office and the station agent's room, along with model trains and exhibits on railroading in the Coeur d'Alene mining district. Every May, the town celebrates the anniversary of the move with Depot Days, a festival and classic automobile show held the day before Mother's Day. The museum stands at 219 Sixth Street, in the shadow of the very viaduct whose construction once threatened to erase it, which makes its survival story easy to read in a single glance.
The trains are gone. The old rail corridor through town now carries the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes, a paved path where steam once ruled. But the depot still does the job it was built for. It welcomes visitors to Wallace, and it reminds them that this town has always known how to hold on to what matters.
Photograph: The Northern Pacific Depot in Wallace, by Warren LeMay, licensed CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.