Interstate 90

Every coast-to-coast drive in America once ended the same way: at a red light in downtown Wallace. Interstate 90 runs more than 3,000 miles from Seattle to Boston, and for years the entire route was a modern, limited-access freeway, except for a few blocks in this little silver town in the Idaho Panhandle, where the interstate simply stopped, funneled every car and truck down Wallace's streets, and made them all wait at a single traffic signal.

Drive into Wallace, Idaho, park on Bank Street, and look around. The brick bank buildings, the old hotels, the storefronts with their tall arched windows — nearly every building in sight is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That is not an exaggeration. The Wallace Historic District covers essentially the entire town, which makes this Silver Valley mining town of a few hundred people one of the most thoroughly preserved communities in the American West.

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.