Wallace: Silver Capital of the World
Idaho
In eighteen eighty-four, a Civil War veteran named William R. Wallace built a cabin where several streams converge on the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River. He planted crops. Then came the silver.
Soon prospectors struck rich silver lodes nearby, and agriculture was finished. Wallace became the hub of the Silver Valley, one of the richest silver districts on earth. Since that first strike, Shoshone County has produced more than a billion ounces of silver. The town is so proud of that number it calls itself the Silver Capital of the World.
Wallace sits in a narrow canyon, and that geography shaped everything: the highway, the railroad, the mine shafts. The entire historic downtown is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the town likes to say it is the last place on Interstate Ninety to be bypassed, owing to a famous legal battle that stalled the freeway for years.
