Center of the Universe Manhole

Bank Street runs through downtown Wallace between brick fronts that, a walking tour notes, have changed little over the century. At Sixth Street, slightly off-center from the intersection, a manhole cover lies in the pavement. A miner fills its face. Four sets of initials border him: HL, CDE, SRLM and BHM, for Hecla Mining, Coeur d’Alene Precious Metals, Sunshine Silver Mine and Bunker Hill Mining Company. A couple of street signs stand nearby. By proclamation of the mayor, this is the exact center of the Universe.

The cover sits over the main sewer line, which runs from Mullan to Paige according to the tour, built by Wallace High School students Abagail Travis, Chuck Tatman and Alijah Richardson. The same tour says the spot was once the John Mullan Memorial Statue. Before Wallace was the Center of the Universe it called itself the Silver Capital of the World. Mining began here in 1884, and the surrounding mines have yielded over 1.2 billion ounces of silver. Every building in the historic downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places. The Spokesman-Review recorded in 2009 that residents worked for the listing in the 1970s, after learning that plans for Interstate 90 threatened to raze much of the district. The highway now passes over the town.

Rededication day at Sixth and Bank

Every September the Historic Wallace Chamber of Commerce rededicates the spot. The 22nd annual Center of the Universe Rededication Ceremony fell on a Saturday in September 2026, and festivities began at noon. Teams in the Wallace Open Putt-Putt Golf Tournament played a course set out at downtown locations, under the theme “Boujee Brunch.” The Elks Round Up Parade Drum & Bugle Band played at 1 p.m. A basket bracket wing-eating contest followed at 2. From 3 to 4:30, on Sixth Street near Cogs Gastropub, drivers competed in the first Wallace Parallel Parking Contest, judged and staffed by the Shoshone County Sheriff’s Office. John Weingart ran karaoke from 3:30 until 6.

Silver raffle tickets sold at Sixth and Bank until 4:45. Only 500 were offered, at $25 each, through the street table and at Johnson’s Gems, WTF Fowl Mouths and the 1313 Club & Saloon. The ceremony itself began at 5 p.m., with KHQ emcee Leslie Lowe on hand. It included a reading of the original proclamation, commemorative toasts and the rededication observance. The putt-putt awards came at 5:15 and the raffle baskets at 5:25. At 5:35 came the drawing for the grand prize, 50 ounces of silver.

Lead sulfide and “probalism”

John Wiltse traced the claim in the Spring 2017 newsletter of the Idaho Legal History Society. The early 1990s had brought tension between the Environmental Protection Agency and a number of small towns in north Idaho. In 2002 the agency found measurable amounts of lead sulfide in the soil under Wallace and attributed it to local mining. Many residents and political leaders answered that the lead sulfide had been there for thousands of years and had posed no health risk during the hundred years of modern occupation. By Wiltse’s account, the EPA invoked “probalism”: if residents could not prove the lead sulfide was not dangerous, then it must be dangerous.

The chamber of commerce tells it somewhat differently. In its version the EPA admitted it could not prove whether the lead in the water came from continued mining or occurred naturally. Since none of the causes could be disproved, the agency expanded the Superfund site from 21 square miles to 1,500, devaluing local homes and businesses.

Shauna Hillman, the town historian, was one of the original four people behind the idea. Her account of the claim starts with “Why not? That’s the answer to why is it the Center of the Universe.” Her second answer: “Prove it isn’t.”

The mayor’s proclamation

The proclamation was ordered and declared on September 25, 2004, at 9:00 p.m., WUT (Wallace Universal Time). It opens: “I, Ron Garitone, Mayor of Wallace, Idaho, and all of its subjects, and being of sound body and mind, do hereby solemnly declare and proclaim Wallace to be the Center of the Universe.”

The mayor credited the “newly discovered science of ‘Probalism’,” pioneered, he wrote, by the EPA and the Department of Health and Welfare, and “peer-reviewed by La Cosa Nostra and the Flat Earth Society.” With it he pinpointed “the exact center within the Center of the Universe; to wit: a sewer access cover slightly off-center from the intersection of Bank and Sixth Streets.” Upon discovering “this desecration,” the town removed the cover. In its place went a monument directing all who come upon it to the Four Corners of the Universe: the Bunker Hill, the Sunshine, the Lucky Friday and the Galena Mines. “Let the courses of all who foray upon these vectors into the known and unknown,” the text goes on, “be forever illuminated by the brilliant, shimmering gleanings of silver, lead and zinc to their destinations, wherever they may be.”

The document places the roots of probalism in the 2002 EPA Coeur d’Alene Basin Record of Decision and states it as a syllogism: “if a thing cannot be disproven, it is thereby proven.” It reports that government-contracted scientists in Moscow, Boise and Seattle, “after years of diligence,” had been unable to unearth “one scintilla of proof that Wallace is NOT the Center of the Universe.”

The journalist David Bond described the claim as “a spoof highlighting the EPA’s use of ‘unfalsifiable science of probabilism’ declaring the Silver Valley a superfund site.” Wiltse called it “one of the most passive-aggressive forms of citizen revolt in Wallace history.” On September 23, 2006, the citizens of Wallace marked the designation with the custom-built manhole cover. The city also invited scientists from around the state to prove that Wallace was not the center of the Universe. As of Wiltse’s 2017 account, none were known to have met the challenge.