Defying death at this year's Fall for History

WALLACE––One of America’s best preserved cities will be celebrating its heritage with a four-day Fall for History Festival on October 5-8.

Festival goers can enjoy a series of colorful lectures, beer tasting and beer history tours, history re-enactments, live theater productions, and guided tours of the town -- which is listed entirely on the National Register of Historic Places.

Defying death and destruction is the theme of this year’s festival. Toward that end the event will feature talks from internationally noted writer and forensic artist Carrie Stuart Parks, including a presentation called “If Bones Could Talk” where she demonstrates how forensic artists reconstruct faces from human skulls.

Over the past thirty-six years, Parks has worked on major criminal cases for such agencies as the FBI and ATF as well as numerous police and sheriff’s departments throughout the US. She is the author of over twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction and is a popular platform speaker, presenting a variety of topics from crime to creativity.

In keeping with theme is an account of former Wallace Mayor Herman Rossi’s salacious 1916 murder trial. (Rossi shot dead his much younger wife’s alleged lover in the lobby of Wallace’s Samuels’ Hotel). Defying death Hollywood style also gets equal time with walking tours of the scenes where the 1997 disaster movie Dante’s Peak was filmed in Wallace.

The defying death motif also gets picked up at the Historic Nine Mile Cemetery, where actors will portray some of the more notable citizens buried there, including the aforementioned Herman Rossi and perhaps the Northwest’s most famous prize fighter, Guido Bardelli, also known as Young Firpo—the Battling Bull of Burke. Bardelli was posthumously inducted in the World Boxing Hall of Fame in 2009.

Other highlights of the event include guided tours of historic homes, churches and commercial district, tours of the town’s three museums, guided tours of the Pulaski Trail, an amusing dinner theater/music show about the town’s past, and other history inspired workshops.

To find out more about the event, get tickets and detailed schedules, visit the Wallace Chamber of Commerce Facebook page, visit their website at www.wallaceidahochamber.com or contact them at (208) 753-7151 or by email at director@wallaceidahochamber.com