Nearly every building in Wallace stands on the National Register of Historic Places, and the town's past is a working part of daily life. These twelve stories from the Wallace Idaho archive cover the founding, the fires, the strikes, the stars, and the stand against the interstate.
Last updated: Friday, November 13, 2026
- The Founding of Wallace: A Silver Town Is Born in 1884: Colonel William R. Wallace buys a townsite in a new silver camp, and a town that would outlast the boom is born.
- The Great Fire of 1910: The Night Wallace Burned: The Big Burn reaches Wallace in August 1910, evacuation trains carry the town to safety, and a third of Wallace burns before the rebuilding in brick begins.
- Edward Pulaski: The Ranger, the Rescue, and the Tool That Bears His Name: A Forest Service ranger holds his crew inside a mine tunnel through the worst night of the 1910 fire, then gives his name to the firefighter's tool he developed.
- The 1892 Miners' Strike and the Frisco Mill Explosion: The Coeur d'Alene labor war erupts in 1892, and the dynamiting of the Frisco Mill brings martial law to the Silver Valley.
- Lana Turner: Wallace's Hometown Movie Star: Julia Jean Turner is born at Providence Hospital in Wallace in 1921 and spends her early childhood here before Hollywood makes her Lana Turner.
- The Bordello Era: Wallace's Open Secret: Wallace's houses operated openly for a century, until the last of them emptied overnight in 1988; the Oasis survives as a museum.
- A Town on the Register: Wallace's Historic Downtown: The Wallace Historic District joins the National Register in 1979 and expands in 1983 to cover essentially the whole town.
- Center of the Universe: Wallace's 2004 Proclamation: Mayor Ron Garitone proclaims Wallace the Center of the Universe in 2004, and the marker at Bank and Sixth Street still settles the question.
- The Last Stoplight on Interstate 90: How Wallace Stood Its Ground: Wallace's historic district forces Interstate 90 onto an elevated viaduct, and the last stoplight on the whole interstate stands here until 1991.
- The Northern Pacific Depot: Wallace's Railroad Landmark: The chateau-style depot built in 1901 anchors Wallace's railroad era, then moves across the river in 1986 to make way for the interstate.
- The Sunshine Mine Disaster of 1972: Fire breaks out in the Sunshine Mine on May 2, 1972; 91 miners are lost in the Silver Valley's defining disaster, and the memorial still stands at Big Creek.
- The Route of the Hiawatha: A Railroad Through the Bitterroots: The Milwaukee Road's Pacific Extension crosses the Bitterroots on trestles and through the Taft Tunnel, and its grade is now one of America's great rail trails.
📜 More Silver Valley History
The Wallace stories above are only part of the valley's past. These links, each from an authoritative source, tell the bigger Silver Valley story: the mission at Cataldo, the Bunker Hill at Kellogg, the mining wars, the Mullan Road, the Murray gold rush, and the long cleanup in Burke Canyon.
- The Cataldo Mission and Old Mission State Park: Idaho State Parks tells the story of the Mission of the Sacred Heart, built between 1850 and 1853 by Catholic missionaries and members of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, the oldest standing building in Idaho and the anchor of the valley's oldest community.
- Bunker Hill and Kellogg's Mining Story: The Shoshone County Mining & Smelting Museum, housed in the 1906 Bunker Hill Staff House in Kellogg, preserves the history of the Bunker Hill Mine and smelter and of the mining and smelting industry that built the Silver Valley.
- The Coeur d'Alene Mining Wars: The Idaho State Historical Society's Reference Series No. 210 gives the society's account of the labor wars of 1892 and 1899, from the dynamited mill at Gem to the day in April 1899 when miners rode a commandeered train to Wardner and blew up the Bunker Hill concentrator.
- The Mullan Road: Kootenai County's history of the first engineered road connecting the Great Plains with the Northwest, built by Captain John Mullan and his crew between 1859 and 1862 to link Fort Benton, Montana, with Fort Walla Walla, Washington, straight through what became the Silver Valley.
- Murray and the 1883-84 Gold Rush: The Sprag Pole Museum's own site carries the story of Murray, the boomtown that briefly held the Shoshone County seat after A. J. Prichard's gold strike touched off one of the last gold rushes in the Lower 48, and of Maggie Hall, remembered as Molly b'Damn, the "Patron Saint of Murray."
- Burke and the Canyon Creek Cleanup: The Coeur d'Alene Basin Commission's "The Dirt" series, produced with the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, follows the cleanup of historic mine waste in Canyon Creek, where work at the Hecla Star Mine Complex above Burke is finishing this year.
- The Bunker Hill Superfund Site: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's official profile of the Bunker Hill Mining and Metallurgical Complex, one of the largest Superfund sites in the country, covering the smelter at Kellogg and the cleanup across the Coeur d'Alene Basin.