Depot Days

On the Saturday before Mother’s Day, Wallace closes its streets to traffic and fills them with old cars. A photograph from the 2025 show finds the corner of Cedar and Seventh lined with them, bumper to bumper. On the grass in front of the Northern Pacific depot, food booths stand beside the tents of what the Northern Pacific Depot Foundation calls “eclectic vendors,” and live music carries over the closed streets. The 2026 Depot Day fell on Saturday, May 9. Visit Wallace listed its address as 600 Bank Street, “Center of the Universe.” The museum explains the name: at the corner of Bank and Sixth, two blocks from the depot, a manhole cover in the pavement carries that title.

Cars on the closed streets

The foundation’s page reports over 300 entries each year. The 2025 count agrees. Kathy Harper, then director of the Northern Pacific Depot Museum, reported 319 vehicles registered, up from 307 the year before, and nearly 2,500 people in town. The figures have climbed: in 2023, organizers told the Coeur d’Alene Press that the show averaged “well over 100 cars” and drew between 2,500 and 3,000 people. Seventy-four trophies were handed out in 2025. Best of Show went to Gary Damm of Spokane and his 1957 Chevy Nomad, and the paper ran his picture with his wife, Sharon.

“It was a great kick-off to our summer season,” Harper said, and she thanked the volunteers and local businesses who carried it. The papers have their own claims for the show. In 2023 the Press called it “the longest-running continuous car show in the Northwest.” In 2025 the Shoshone News-Press called it “the Inland Northwest’s longest running car show.” The newspapers sometimes write the name as Depot Days, and the museum writes it as Depot Day.

The 2023 program, as the Press described it, opened with a parade through town and ran on with live music and entertainment, craft vendors selling handmade goods, and food from classic fair fare to huckleberry jam and smoked meats. Each Depot Day the museum also runs a raffle. In 2025 Elmer and Corki Mattila of Wallace won it, taking home a framed print of the depot set inside a ring of commemorative coins minted by the Sunshine Mine.

Heather Branstetter, a Wallace city councilwoman, told the papers in 2023, “My favorite festival is Depot Days because my grandpa and dad have always had a thing for classic cars and passed that appreciation on to me.” The show is the main fundraiser for the depot museum. Dick Caron of the depot board gave the reason behind the day: “Every year, the hope is that Depot Days is the kickoff to a great summer and tourism season for all of the businesses in Wallace.”

The château on Sixth Street

The building the cars come to honor stands at 219 Sixth Street, at the corner of Pine. The 1976 National Register nomination, prepared by State Historic Preservation Officer Merle W. Wells, describes a two-story structure in the Chateau style. Cut stone banding runs up from the foundation. The first story is brick and the second is stuccoed concrete, with a pent roof between them. All the windows sit under brick segmental arches. A three-story tower at one corner dominates the building. Its third story carries vertical wooden molding in a Tudoresque manner, and a conical roof above it ends in a finial. The depot followed Northern Pacific plan number 281-1, a formula design. The nomination notes that the Chateau style was then common in Canada for railway stations and railway hotels.

Inside, the museum has re-created an early working station, including a turn-of-the-century railroad agent’s room with an old safe and a telephone from 1908 that visitors may talk on. Upstairs, the bell from Northern Pacific steam locomotive No. 4025 can be rung. The depot also serves as the trailhead for the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes, a bicycle path laid on the old railroad bed between Mullan and Plummer. Cindy Lein said of the building, “Her image is on posters, signs, t-shirts, she’s a superstar.” The museum’s own pages name a Cindy Browning Lien as its director and station master and credit her with a part in running Depot Day.

Brick from a hotel in Tacoma

Trains first reached Wallace on September 30, 1887. The route was awkward, according to the nomination. Northern Pacific track ran to Rathdrum Prairie, a branch line ran to steamer docks on Lake Coeur d’Alene, a steamboat went up to the old Coeur d’Alene Mission, and a narrow-gauge railway covered the last stretch to the mines. The Northern Pacific took over the whole line, including a small original depot in Wallace. When the line washed out in 1890, the river route was abandoned, and the railroad brought its Wallace traffic in over a new grade from the Missoula side. Wallace became the place where Union Pacific and Northern Pacific service met. Operations were enlarged in 1900. The new depot, an “elegant brick and concrete edifice, ornate and picturesque,” in the nomination’s quoted phrase, opened December 29, 1901. The Idaho Heritage Trust and an Eastern Washington University public-history account both give the year as 1902.

The sources disagree about the brick. All of them agree it was meant for a Northern Pacific hotel in Tacoma. A caption on the back of a Barnard Studio photograph, taken around 1905 and now held by the University of Idaho, says the depot was built for $8,330 “with brick from China.” By that account the brick was imported in 1890 for the Olympic Hotel, which burned when only partly built and was taken apart between 1899 and 1901 to supply the depots at Wallace and Missoula. The Heritage Trust tells the same story. The museum calls the hotel the Olympian and describes it as the original terminus of the transcontinental line. Its floor-plan page also says the bricks were made by Gladding McBean of Lincoln, California. The nomination says only that the brick matches that of a Northern Pacific hotel begun in Tacoma in 1891 and abandoned in 1893, a building that later became Stadium High School. Of the concrete there is one account: it was mixed from cement and from tailings off the concentrators of the big Coeur d’Alene mines.

Two hundred feet in 1986

The depot was entered in the National Register in 1976. The Northern Pacific, by then Burlington Northern, ran its last train in 1978. Interstate 90 was already on its way. The first plan, the Press reported, put the highway through the middle of town. Local leaders, Harry F. Magnuson in particular, got all of Wallace listed on the National Register. The museum and the Eastern Washington account give equal credit to Nancy Lee Hanson. The highway went around the town by a few hundred yards, by the Eastern Washington account, but the depot still stood in its path.

On May 10, 1986, the Idaho Transportation Department moved the building in the manner the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation had laid out. The move was about 200 feet, across the South Fork of the Coeur d’Alene River, to clear room for two highway columns of the Wallace Viaduct. The newspapers place the new site at the mouth of Nine Mile Canyon. The department paid for a restoration and then gave the building to the City of Wallace. According to the museum, the viaduct also took out the last stoplight on I-90 between Seattle and Boston. The last train of any line, a Union Pacific, served the area on July 15, 1994.

The first Depot Days was held in 1987, in May, near the anniversary of the move. “I think one of the most outstanding things about Depot Days is its longevity,” Caron said in 2023. “I think a lot of that is because our board has stuck together ever since the move.” The 2025 show was the thirty-ninth. Harper expected the next one, marking forty years since the move and the depot’s 125th birthday, to be the biggest yet.