Wallace

Colonel Wallace’s Cabin

Wallace sits in a narrow canyon on the Coeur d’Alene River, at the point where, the depot’s register nomination says, routes from Burke and Mullan converged.^2,5,6 The town began in 1884 with a small cabin that Colonel Wallace built as his headquarters.² One local history says the town is named for William R. Wallace, a local farmer, and that silver mining soon replaced agriculture.³ The discovery of the Poorman and Tiger silver lodes set off a boom that year, and by 1886 more than five hundred people lived in the town.³ Promoters of the Northern Pacific had stirred up the 1884 Coeur d’Alene gold rush, and the railway’s trains reached Wallace on September 30, 1887.^4,6 The historic district nomination says Wallace became the first town in Shoshone County to incorporate, on May 2, 1888.² In February 1889 there were troubles with the townsite: the Interior had ruled that the scrip with which Colonel Wallace bought the land was not subject to sale, and the townspeople appointed a committee to check into the title.²

Brick After the Fire of 1890

On July 27, 1890, a fire started in a defective flue in the Central Hotel on North Sixth Street and destroyed the entire business section.^2,7 The Coeur d’Alene Miner proclaimed that the day marked the beginning of permanent prosperity.² Owners rebuilt in brick, and most of the downtown district went up in 1890 and 1891.^2,7 The Bank of Wallace building went up in 1890, and in 1895 Herman Rossi bought it and added a second story and a turret.^2,7 A referendum on November 8, 1898, moved the Shoshone County seat to Wallace, following the shift of population from the gold camps around Murray to the lead-silver mines around Wallace.^1,4

Dynamite on Canyon Creek

On July 11, 1892, the Frisco mill at Gem was blown up, and men were then detained in bull pens at Wallace.² In April 1899 armed miners commandeered a Northern Pacific train run by an engineer named Hutton and loaded it with men, guns and explosives as it rolled down Canyon Creek.⁸ The train rolled through Wallace to Kellogg, where by one account the miners dynamited the Bunker Hill smelter; a local history names the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mines, and the 1937 guide says they blew up the mill.^3,5,8 The troops President McKinley sent were African-American Buffalo soldiers, who came from Fort George Wright in Spokane by one account and from Missoula by another.^3,8

The 1910 Fire and the Hercules Mill

In the Great Fire of 1910 the wind forced the fire along the south hill and spared the downtown district, while the east side of Wallace burned.⁸ One local history says the Big Burn destroyed at least one-third of Wallace and killed over eighty people in the Inland Northwest, and the town’s historical marker says North Idaho’s 2,000,000-acre forest fire was stopped here.^1,3 Ranger Ed Pulaski ran his crew over the ridge to the West Fork of Placer Creek and into a mine; a U.S. Forest Service marker says he saved all but 6 of his 45-man crew, and another account says he held 42 firefighters there until the fire passed.^8,9 In 1921 two monuments, called the lower and the upper, were built over the graves of men who died on the West Fork of Placer Creek and at the Bullion Mine.¹⁰ The city received a $12,000 Carnegie grant in 1910, and the library it built, completed in April 1911, has served Wallace as a library since.¹¹ Built in 1911, the Hercules Mill towered 87 feet above the Northern Pacific tracks entering Wallace and fed lead-silver concentrates to rail cars until full operation ended in 1949, after an estimated three quarters of a million tons.¹²

The Freeway and the Depot

In 1937 the state guide counted 3,634 people, called Wallace the distributing center of a large mining and lumbering area, and said its stores offered a greater variety of exotic delicacies than most cities a hundred times its size.⁵ Mining tapered off after World War II, and the population, which one local history puts at nearly four thousand at its peak in the 1940s, fell to less than 800 by 2010.³ The first plan for Interstate 90, presented in 1977, would have raised the freeway 25 feet through the north side of the business district, and Harry Magnuson, enlisted by Nancy Lee Hanson, sued the Idaho Department of Transportation.⁸ Under a 1984 compromise the interstate could not harm a building in historic Wallace, by then listed entirely on the register, and the city calls itself the only city in the country so listed.^8,13 On May 10, 1986, the Northern Pacific depot, built in 1901, was moved to a similar setting on the edge of downtown.⁶ Interstate 90 opened the viaduct over Wallace in 1992.⁸