'The man who saved Wallace'

WALLACE - Back in 1960, state and federal highway planners were saying publicly that it would take two years to punch an Interstate 90 freeway corridor through the historic mining town of Wallace, leveling much of the canyon-cramped city's elegant Elizabethan architecture. Confident, they began leveling neighborhoods and condemning business and municipal structures to make way for the new Wallace freeway bypass.

But they neglected to take into account one feisty and ferocious factor: Wallace native son Harry F. Magnuson. Harry Magnuson took the bulldozing agencies to court and stopped the project, in the process saving the downtown of the only city in America to be listed in its entirety on the National Register of Historic Places.

Magnuson, who died at age 85 in January 2009, will be honored by the city he saved at a public dedication ceremony noon Saturday at the Northern Pacific Depot in Wallace during the annual Depot Days celebration with a re-naming of the 1.7-mile route through town that once bore all of I-90's pre-bypass traffic "The Harry F. Magnuson Way."

"Harry was the man who saved Wallace," remembers long-time friend and four-term Idaho Governor Cecil D. Andrus, whose administration spanned many of the years that Magnuson fought the freeway builders. "It was Harry's brute strength and determination and continual pressure that made the state and federal highway departments re-engineer that thing. Harry won that battle and saved Wallace from destruction."

Magnuson became involved in the freeway battle in the early 1970s about the same time third-generation mining executive Henry L. Day was denied his request that freeway planners consider a second interchange on the east end of town. Originally, plans called for a full interchange only on the west end of Wallace and a half-interchange near Burke Canyon.

"Businesses feared that the freeway traffic (once routed on the bypass) would avoid town," recalls retired Idaho Transportation Department district engineer Robert Dunsmore. But Magnuson, who wore his love for his hometown on his sleeve, feared worse, that Wallace's very essence would disappear with the razing of so many buildings.

Magnuson hired Coeur d'Alene attorney Scott Reed to find a way to halt the advancing bulldozers, and they found one. Magnuson and business partner John McGee sued the ITD for having failed to file an Environmental Impact Statement as required under the newly-enacted National Environmental Policy Act. It was the first time a government project had ever been challenged under NEPA. Magnuson prevailed in 1971.

But when the EIS was completed, he and Wallace preservationist Nancy Lee Hansen sued the transportation department again, claiming the impact statement was inadequate, and again prevailed. Among the Court's 1976 findings was that local public opinion had not adequately been considered.

The rulings bought Wallace much-needed time: A listing on the National Register of Historic Places was obtained, first in 1976 for the Northern Pacific Depot, then in 1979 for the entire downtown business district.

But the ITD, recalls Dunsmore, already had let a contract to commence freeway construction on the west end of the town. Gravel had been hauled in and a ramp had been shaped. With the bypass halted, locals began dubbing the unfinished project "Mount Manning" after then-ITD Director Darrell Manning.

In response, the bypass-builders hired Colorado-based DeLeuw, Cather and Co. to re-do the environmental impact statement and a four-year-long series of hearings in Wallace ensued. Meantime, hearings held by the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation continued to express near-unanimous local opposition to the freeway project.

DeLeuw, Cather came up with a half-dozen "alternatives" for the bypass, ranging from maintaining the status quo to blasting a two-mile tunnel through the mountains north of town. After more than two decades of haggling, the current bypass alignment (with Hank Day's full east-end interchange) was agreed to by the people of Wallace, Magnuson and the state and federal highway departments.

There was one problem remaining. The 1964 version of the I-90 bypass put the new freeway over the top of the Coeur d'Alene River's South Fork. The peace-treaty version moved the bypass slightly to the north, over the Northern Pacific rail line, placing the N.P. Depot directly in its path. The depot, now under protection of the National Parks Service's National Register of Historic Places, and constructed of 15,000 Chinese-made bricks destined for Tacoma, had to be moved out of the way.

Debate raged in Wallace over the station's new location. The City Council voted to move it out by the west-end interchange, a good half-mile mile away, but, once again, Nature intervened. A heavy, wet, January 1985 snow collapsed a vacant Safeway grocery store rooftop right across the tracks and the South Fork from the depot. The depot's new location now was obvious.

A year later, on April 26, 1986, after months of preparation and beefing-up of the Ninemile bridge over the South Fork, Bates House Moving of Spokane hauled the depot across the river to its new location. Cost of the move and the depot's restoration exceed one-half million dollars.

Wallace residents are never wont to miss an opportunity to wager and made book on how long the trip would take. Chris Stuecker, who organized the "Last Annual Depot Derby" - precursor to the annual May Depot Days Festival - remembers a glitch in the betting that first year: "We had a starting line, but nobody thought to establish a finish line," Stuecker says.

For former ITD engineer Dunsmore, who found himself in Magnuson's cross-hairs more than a few times during the freeway fracas, there are no hard feelings. "I will be at the dedication. Harry did a lot for this town," Dunsmore says.