Biohazard and Crime Scene Remediation in Wallace, ID

Wallace is a city in and the county seat of Shoshone County, Idaho, in the Silver Valley mining district of the Idaho Panhandle, with a population of 791 at the 2020 census.

Wallace is nicknamed the "Silver Capital of the World," and it sits alongside the South Fork of the Coeur d'Alene River and Interstate 90.

In the spring of 1884, Colonel William R. Wallace, a Civil War veteran, built a cabin at a site he called "Placer Center," and citizens petitioned for the town's incorporation, now called Wallace after the Colonel, on May 2, 1888.

Wallace went from governance by a board of trustees to a city charter in 1893, and its first official mayor was William S. Haskins, who was shortly thereafter appointed as Idaho's first State Mining Inspector.

In 1898, Wallace won a campaign to become the county seat of Shoshone County, garnering about three-quarters of the votes cast.

In July 1890, a fire aided by strong winds destroyed thirteen saloons, six hotels, a bank, a theater, and more than thirty other stores and shops in Wallace, and one third of the town was later destroyed by the Great Fire of 1910.

Wallace was the center of the Coeur d'Alene labor strikes of 1892 and 1899, and in 1899 about a thousand men were rounded up and held in a crude prison dubbed "the bullpen" after attackers blew up the Bunker Hill and Sullivan mill at Wardner.

From 1884 to 1991, regulated brothel-based sex work openly flourished in Wallace, and the former Oasis Bordello is now the Oasis Bordello Museum.

When the Bunker Hill smelter in Kellogg shut down in 1981, the Silver Valley lost a vast number of jobs, but the Lucky Friday mine, about 7 miles east of Wallace near Mullan, remains in operation.

Several blocks of downtown Wallace were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 as the Wallace Historic District, after city leaders learned that plans for Interstate 90 would virtually wipe out the entire downtown.