Lost Towns -- Before Malls And Microsoft, There Were Coal Mines And Lumber Towns. Today Few Traces Remain Of Once-Thriving Parts Of The Eastside.

This is the first in an occasional Thursday series exploring Eastside history.

Say "Eastside history" and some people snicker.

The subdivisions, corporate campuses and shopping centers look too new, too recent, for historical roots.

But before Bellevue Square and Redmond Town Center, there were company stores and Native-American trading grounds on the Eastside. Long before Microsoft, lumber companies shored up the local economy.

Eastside development didn't start when Lake Washington was spanned by a bridge but when entrepreneurs looked at the giant trees that covered the land between Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains, the water running in the valleys and the coal under the hills - and saw gold.

Workers saw jobs.

Together they created such places as Redtown, Donnelly, Monohon, Snoqualmie Falls, Taylor and Moncton.

When the lumber was gone and the mines closed, some towns survived. Others changed names or were absorbed by bigger towns. Some simply disappeared.

Donnelly, for instance, was a sawmill settlement at the southwestern end of Lake Sammamish in the 1870s. Today only piling remains where barges once picked up lumber and carried it up the lake, through the Sammamish River and into Lake Washington to Seattle.

Taylor, an industrial town in the Cedar River watershed, once housed 900 workers and their families. It was condemned and shut down in 1945.

Kerriston, southeast of Preston, boasted a population of 400 during the Eastside's logging heyday in the early 1900s. A few deserted houses, a church and an old schoolhouse marked the site in the early 1950s, when David and Nancy Horrocks of Issaquah stumbled upon it.

"We looked in the window of the schoolhouse, and everything was there waiting, like it had been left for students," Nancy Horrocks said. "There were even McGuffey Readers on the desks."

Remnants of the town of Moncton lie beneath Rattlesnake Lake just south of Interstate 90 near North Bend.

Local historians have preserved some records of the Eastside's lost towns, enough to show how development of the area's communities

happened in stages:

First came a handful of homesteaders, followed by a few sawmill and logging villages. The logging operations cleared the land, opening it to mining of coal, clay and gravel. The farms came later, eventually disappearing as subdivisions and business parks sprouted in their place.

How many sawmills were there? Dozens and dozens.

Tiger Mountain near Issaquah was ringed by about 100 sawmills during the logging years. About eight mills operated between 1890 and 1930 in the Redmond area. An early Bellevue mill stood about where City Hall is today. When an area was logged out, companies packed up their sawmill machinery and moved to a new site.

Much of the Eastside wood was shipped east via rail, although some stayed closer to home and trussed up decades of building in the Northwest.

What was life like in the lost towns?

In 1915, when roads were mere muddy paths, you could catch a train in Moncton and spend the afternoon shopping in Seattle.

If you lived in 1906 in High Point, between what is now Preston and Issaquah, you could mail a letter at the local post office and stop to visit a traveling salesman at the hotel. Inside the High Point mill, when men could make themselves heard above the machinery, they spoke Swedish. Owner John Lovgren hired only Swedish immigrants.

"It made a cohesive community," says history buff Eric Erickson of Issaquah. "They didn't have the turnover in workers many other mills had."

The policy earned the town its nickname: Little Sweden.

If you were a coal miner in Newcastle during the 1890s, your children learned to read in the town school that served this thriving community of about 1,000 people. You could go to the community's church on Sunday.

At Snoqualmie Falls from the 1920s to the 1950s, scrap wood filled the woodshed behind your six-room company house - four on the main floor and two in the attic - plus an outhouse.

Bachelors usually lived in communal bunkhouses or dormitories. Japanese workers often had separate dormitories.

Going to Seattle was a popular Saturday night activity for the mill workers in the early part of this century, Erickson says. Railroads, which crisscrossed much of the Eastside, would run Saturday night trains to bring workers into Seattle. On Sunday afternoons the foreman would go into Seattle and round up his crew, bringing them back on the final night train so they'd be ready to work Mondays.

Life in the company towns was a mixed bag, recalled Walt Seil of Issaquah, whose father worked at the Snoqualmie Falls sawmill.

"We literally owed our soul to the company store," he said. "You bought everything there."

But the company took care of workers and their families, he said, providing for medical care at the company hospital, education in the company school and a social life at the community center.

Traces of the Eastside's lost towns still can be found. A Monohon sign designates the former stop on the railroad tracks along East Lake Sammamish Parkway.

A few High Point houses remain on a dead-end road north of I-90. In 1910, Erickson's father was born in one of those houses. The former schoolhouse has become a church, and all of the visible houses on the road have been remodeled. The town's footprint, including the mill pond, was buried under I-90 at Exit 20.

Many Eastside maps contain former town names as area designations. Physical evidence may have disappeared, but the past lives on in neighborhood names.

Sherry Grindeland's phone message number is 206-515-5633. Her e-mail address is: sgri-new@seatimes.com ---------------------------------------------------------- The old Eastside's bustling towns: 18 communities that are mostly gone

Adelaide: Benjamin Dixon claimed the area near the northeastern corner of Lake Sammamish in 1884. Two years later he proposed a post office named after a local girl (possibly his daughter), Adelaide Dixon. The Campbell Mill opened here in 1905 and was destroyed by fire in the early 1920s.

Avondale: Four homesteaders named this small settlement near the junction of Bear and Cottage Lake creeks around 1890. An early business was a legal whiskey distillery.

Barneston: This sawmill town in the Cedar River watershed got a post office in 1901, and the entire town was torn down in 1924. It was named for John G. Barnes, a Seattle businessman.

Cedar Falls: After Seattle wells ran dry in the Great Seattle Fire of 1889, city fathers looked to the Cedar River for a reliable and clean water supply, buying up to 45,000 surrounding acres by 1911. The town of Cedar Falls was built by Seattle City Light to house construction workers for its first power plant. Today three houses, street lights and a dilapidated tennis court remain.

Coal Creek: This community 1 1/2 miles east of Newcastle flourished as a coal-mining village from the 1880s until the 1920s. Between the two communities there were 3,000 residents, dance halls, stores, schools and barbershops.

Derby: In 1905, homesteaders in the northern end of the Sammamish Valley caught trains for Bothell or Seattle in Derby. The settlement had a store, dance hall and schoolhouse. A big brick schoolhouse replaced the original wooden structure in 1912, and today drivers along Woodinville-Redmond Road Northeast recognize it as the Hollywood Schoolhouse. Derby was renamed Hollywood by Frederick Stimson, who built the schoolhouse and named it after the numerous holly trees he had planted on the logged-over hill. Stimson's dairy farm is now the site of the Chateau Ste. Michelle winery.

Donnelly: In the 1870s, a small community developed on the southwest end of Lake Sammamish, near the mouth of Lewis Creek. Sometimes noted on maps as Donelly's, the settlement included the sawmill and a dock. When the surrounding area was logged out in 1889, the sawmill was dismantled and moved to the east side of Lake Sammamish.

Hazelwood: The post office, town, railway station and boat landing that were here in 1907 have been replaced by Interstate 405 and the Lake Washington shoreline neighborhood of Pleasure Point in South Bellevue.

High Point: In 1906, 40 sawmill employees and their families lived in this small valley town between Preston and Issaquah. The High Point mill and logging camps burned in 1922 but were rebuilt. The mill burned again in 1932, was rebuilt in 1935 and became the Tiger Mountain Sawmill in 1949.

Hobart: First settled in the late 1870s, this sawmill town faded after the mill burned in the mid-1930s. Once it had a hotel, a store, houses and a railroad station. Today it is a neighborhood south of Issaquah, with a store and fire station.

Kerriston: This sawmill town southeast of Preston was named after founder and mill owner Albert Kerry. He was a leading Seattle resident and built the Olympic Hotel, now the Four Seasons Olympic. During the heyday of Eastside and South King County logging, it was home to 400 people. It ceased operation in 1943.

Moncton: Near the remains of Cedar Falls, this former Native-American trading ground was logged and farmed, and became a railroad community in the early part of the century when the Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad was built through Snoqualmie Pass. When the Cedar River was blocked to form Cedar Lake - now Chester Morse Lake - seepage through glacial moraine slowly flooded Moncton. Today foundations of the school, gymnasium, indoor swimming pool, post office and houses lie under Rattlesnake Lake.

Monohon: In 1889 the saws and equipment from Donnelly were moved to the eastern shore of Lake Sammamish. A company town grew up around it, housing several hundred people in the first half of this century. At one time the company owned 120 acres of property along the lake and up the hill toward the Sammamish Plateau. A spectacular fire burned much of the town in the mid-1920s. Named after Martin Monohon, who homesteaded a ranch there in 1871, the town was where today's East Lake Sammamish Parkway and Northeast 33rd Street intersect.

Newcastle: There's old Newcastle and new Newcastle. Coal was king in the old Newcastle, the second-largest community in King County in the 1880s. About 1,000 people, miners and their families lived in the company town. Bellevue farmers went to Newcastle to vote on Election Day, and off-duty miners played pool and drank beer in local saloons. The original town faded away by the 1930s. The new Newcastle, in the same general area, was incorporated three years ago in a 4.5-square-mile area between Bellevue and Renton.

Redtown: A mining settlement near Newcastle in what is now the Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park was 750 people strong in 1912. Today an old sign, on the Cougar Mountain trails, points the direction to the site.

Snoqualmie/Snoqualmie Falls: Today's Snoqualmie was platted in 1889 as Snoqualmie Falls. It became Snoqualmie almost instantly. So the name Snoqualmie Falls was available when Weyerhaeuser developed a company town a mile north, across the Snoqualmie River. It existed from 1917 to the mid-1950s and had the first Eastside mill powered by electricity. At the peak, 250 families lived in the company town. The houses were sold and moved in 1958, and a bulldozer destroyed the community center, hospital and other surplus buildings. Weyerhaeuser still operates the sawmill.

Taylor: The need for water and sewage pipes along the West Coast built Taylor. Nearby deposits of clay for the pipe and coal to power the production plant made it an ideal industrial community when it was started by the Renton-Denny Coal Co. in 1893 about eight miles east of Maple Valley. During the height of production, 39 boxcars of pipe and brick were shipped each week. The company's mines, in the Cedar River watershed, about four miles from Hobart, were flooded in the 1920s. Gladding, McBean and Co. took over the production in 1927.

Pollution from outhouses for the 900 workers and their families and from pipe and brick production were too close to Seattle's water supply, and the town was condemned and shut down in 1945.

York: A gleam in an investor's eye, this town never amounted to more than a mark on early maps, a train station and a few homes. The name first appeared on 1880 title maps, according to the late Lucile McDonald, a local historian. It was near Redmond, along the western edge of the Sammamish Valley by Willows Road and just south of Northeast 124th Street. By 1906 the land, like the rest of the Sammamish Valley, was used for dairy farming.

Seattle Times librarians Cathy Donaldson and Stephen Selter contributed to this report. ---------------------------------------------------------- Where are they now? Old towns, new names

Some early Eastside communities began under different names. Redmond, for example, was once known as Salmonberg. Mercer Island was originally East Seattle. Here are others that have changed over the years:

Beaumont: An early name for the Bellevue area that includes Beaux Arts and Enatai.

Cherry Valley: Now goes by Duvall, named for loggers James and Francis Duvall, who settled there in 1871.

Gilman: The inland portion of Issaquah until 1895.

Houghton: Once a separate incorporated community, now part of Kirkland. In 1880 it was one of three Eastside towns.

Hubbard: An early name for Juanita.

Moorland: On early maps this designated the areas now known as Meydenbauer Bay, Medina and Clyde Hill.

Salmonberg: Redmond had this moniker until 1881, when it became Melrose. It was renamed Redmond in 1883.

Squak: The lakefront portion of Issaquah.

Squak Lake: Lake Sammamish.

St. Louis: An early name for Preston.

Tolt: Changed to Carnation in recognition of the milk company that opened a major farm nearby.