Historic Downtown

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.

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.

For roughly a century, the world's oldest profession operated in Wallace in plain sight. In most American towns, the trade hid in shadows and euphemisms. In this Idaho silver camp, it was an open secret: confined to a known district, watched over by the city health officer, and run by madams whom much of the town regarded as respectable businesswomen. Wallace remembers the era today with more candor than embarrassment.

The summer of 1910 was the driest in memory across the northern Rockies. By August, some 1,700 separate fires were burning in the national forests of northern Idaho and western Montana, fed by a record drought, logging slash, and sparks from locomotives. Forest Service crews — many of them hastily hired immigrants and students — fought the scattered fires for weeks with hand tools. Then, on Saturday, August 20, a violent cold front drove hurricane-force winds across the region, and in about 36 hours the separate fires merged into a single firestorm that burned roughly three million acres.

On February 8, 1921, a baby girl was born at Providence Hospital in Wallace who would become one of the most famous movie stars in the world. Her name was Julia Jean Turner, the only child of John Virgil Turner, a miner from Montgomery, Alabama, and Mildred Frances Cowan of Lamar, Arkansas, who was herself just four days shy of her seventeenth birthday. The family was living in the nearby mining camp of Burke when she was born, in the heart of an Idaho silver district then producing some of the richest ore on earth.