Wallace - Silver Capital of the World RoadyGoat
1884Wallace, Idaho, is the only city in America where every single building in the downtown is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The whole town. The story of how that happened is pure Wallace. In the 1990s, the federal government wanted to route Interstate 90 directly through the historic downtown. Wallace fought back. A group of citizens registered every building in the business district on the National Register, making it illegal to demolish them for a freeway. The interstate was rerouted over the town on a viaduct instead. Wallace won. But the town had already survived worse. Founded in 1884 when prospectors struck silver in the Coeur d'Alene Mountains, Wallace became the center of the richest silver mining district on Earth. The Silver Valley has produced over 1.2 billion ounces of silver since 1884. In 1890, a fire burned most of the wooden downtown to the ground. The miners rebuilt in brick and stone. Twenty years later, in August 1910, the Big Blowup hit. The largest wildfire in American history burned three million acres across Idaho and Montana, most of it in two catastrophic days. Hurricane-force winds drove the fire into Wallace, destroying a third of the town. Passenger trains evacuated thousands of residents to Spokane. Eighty-seven people died across the region, most of them firefighters. Wallace rebuilt again. The town also has a less respectable legacy. The Oasis Bordello Museum preserves one of several brothels that operated openly in Wallace until 1988, when the FBI finally shut them down. The building was left exactly as it was on the day of the raid, with personal effects still on the nightstands. Wallace has never pretended to be anything other than what it is: a mining town that refuses to die.
