Wallace Finale: Burke Mining Town

We love Ghost Towns so the final event on Fall for History's itinerary was a must!

Burke Revisited...Here’s your chance to learn the colorful history of Burke on a tour led by local historians Charlie Mooney and Steve Turley. What made the entire event that much more exceptional was the fact that Charlie grew up in this town and returned, as an adult, to work in the mines for twelve years. He had some amazing stories to share. Wow.

Burke, Idaho is not your run-of-the-mill ghost town. Its story starts out familiar: The mining town rose up after rich deposits of silver and lead were discovered in 1884. But the boomtown that developed was situated in a comically narrow canyon, resulting in some wonderfully creative architecture.

With little of the town remaining, we were armed with a packet of old photos and our vivid imaginations.

Burke Canyon is long and thin, only 300 feet wide at its narrowest point. It’s a seemingly impossible space to fit a whole town into, and yet they did. The train tracks and the road for vehicles both shared the main street, so cars and carriages had to pull over when the train rolled by.

The story of Burke begins in 1884, with the discovery of rich silver ore. Mines and mills popped up in the surrounding hillsides, and within three years Burke was a true boomtown filled with wooden buildings and a railroad.

So narrow was the canyon that in 1888, the S.S. Glidden's Tiger Hotel had to be built over, rather than beside, Canyon Creek. Railroad tracks and Burke's only highway also had to run through his hotel. When a second railroad arrived in 1890, its tracks had to be laid in Burke's only street. No other hotel had two railroads, a street, and a stream running through its lobby.

The infamous hotel was three stories, had 150 rooms, and was said to feed around 1,200 people daily. The Hotel had two major sections, the old boarding house built in 1888, and the large addition built in 1915. Five passenger trains passed through the building each day. The hotel was dismantled in 1954.

The largest mine in the early days was the Hercules Mine, which operated until 1925, and its mill lasting at least through 1938. The HECLA Mine got off to a little slower start.

And as cinematic tidbit, probably the most famous resident from here was Julia Jean Turner, who became known to the world as Lana Turner. The family lived in Burke at the time of Turner's birth, and relocated to nearby Wallace in 1925, where her father opened a dry cleaning service and worked in the local silver mines. She expressed interest in performance at a young age, performing short dance routines at her father's Elks chapter in Wallace. At age three, she performed an impromptu dance routine at a charity fashion show, in Burke, in which her mother was modeling. Every town has a story.

Like so many mining towns in the Old West, Burke began to decline at the beginning of the 20th century and the mines starting shutting down. By 1990 there were reportedly just 15 residents left in town. The last of the mines closed in 1991, and within a few years, there was no one left in Burke.

After our last Fall for History tour ended, we strolled to the historic Nine Mine Cemetery, with its graves dating from the 1880s.

To the right, very near the entrance and only a few feet from the graveyard’s flagpole, sits the prominent grave of Herman J. Rossi. Rumor is that Rossi’s grave had been consigned to this location, across the road from the cemetery’s main grounds, because of objections that he was a murderer. While in Coeur d'Alene, we went to an author talk about The Rossi Murder. Intriguing, indeed.

A monument to Idaho’s Big Blowup fires of 1910 is here too, paying tribute to the USFS workers who lost their lives and also to Edward Pulaski who saved many lives during the . He invented a tool still used today, The Pulaski, which has become standard equipment in the Northern Rockies Division of the U.S. Forest Service.

It was one of the largest forest fires in American history. Maybe even one of the largest forest fire ever anywhere in the world. No one knows for sure, but even now, it is hard to put into words what it did. For two terrifying days and night's - August 20 and 21, 1910 - the fire raged across three million acres of virgin timberland in northern Idaho and western Montana.