Wallace, Idaho is a small town with an outsized historical footprint, its entire downtown listed as a National Historic Landmark district thanks to its role in the region’s silver-mining boom, and sitting right in the middle of that historic district at 504 Bank Street is North Idaho Trading Company, a shop that has spent 32 years earning its self-applied nickname as the weirdest little shop in the Northwest. The business operates as part antique store, part pawnshop, and part oddities museum, a combination that shows up the moment a visitor walks in and finds a six-foot mummified mermaid and a full-body articulated skeleton sharing floor space with cases of fine jewelry and shelves of local history items. It is an unusual mix for a town of Wallace’s size, but it fits a place that has leaned into its mining-era character rather than smoothing it over for tourists passing through on Interstate 90.
The inventory runs considerably deeper than novelty items. North Idaho Trading Company holds an active Type 02 Federal Firearms License, and the shop’s back rooms and display cases hold hundreds of firearms, both antique and modern, alongside ammunition, knives, and hunting gear that give it a genuine role as a working gun shop in addition to its antique and curiosity trade. Taxidermy is another major category, with more than 150 mounted pieces on display throughout the store, anchored by a full-body albino elk mount positioned in the front window, a piece distinctive enough that it has become something of a landmark for people trying to describe the shop’s location to out-of-town visitors. Beyond the firearms and mounts, browsers will find advertising signs, retro toys, petroliana, vintage clothing, musical instruments, and the kind of local Silver Valley history items that turn up nowhere else, since much of what the shop carries has passed through the hands of Wallace and Shoshone County families for generations.
That combination of licensed firearms dealer, taxidermy collection, and oddities museum is what sets North Idaho Trading Company apart from a standard antique mall, and it is also why the shop draws attention from travel and offbeat-attraction writers well beyond typical antiquing circles; a shop built around a mummified mermaid and an albino elk earns word-of-mouth that a conventional antique store rarely does. At the same time, the everyday backbone of the business, buying, selling, and trading firearms and general merchandise under a long-standing FFL, has kept it a working part of Wallace’s small commercial district for over three decades, not just a tourist curiosity.
North Idaho Trading Company keeps hours Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and can be reached at 208-753-2911, making it an easy stop for anyone exploring Wallace’s historic mining-town downtown, whether the goal is browsing antiques, checking out a firearm, or simply seeing the mermaid and the elk for themselves. North Idaho Trading Company in Wallace is the Silver Valley’s antique store, pawnshop, and oddities museum in one, a 32-year-old fixture known equally for its licensed firearms counter and its mummified mermaid.
