Black Diamonds -- The Newcastle Area's Bustling Mining Industry Helped The Puget Sound Region Coalese In The 1860S And '70S

NEWCASTLE

It was an economic boom that lasted for more than 50 years - one that helped put Seattle and the Eastside on the map.

And it was a force that almost overnight turned this part of the Pacific Northwest into an ethnic melting pot.

Described in newspapers of the day, it was called "coal rush" and "coal fever."

Coal. Black diamonds. Black gold.

It didn't replace the growing logging industry, but the discovery of coal in Issaquah and Newcastle in the early 1860s strengthened the region's economic backbone and turned Seattle into a thriving port of call.

Miners by the hundreds, mostly immigrants from Europe, flocked to the infant towns of Newcastle, Coal Creek and Renton. In a way, they were pioneers, first- and second-generation folks from Wales, Finland, Italy, England, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, Croatia and Slovakia.

They lived in small settlements - Coal Creek, Red Town, Finn Town and Rainbow Town - separated by culture and national origin. They labored in mines with names such as Primrose, Bagley, May Creek, Muldoon and Jones.

Scratching a meager living from beneath the forested hills that sprawled across the Eastside, the men and boys often worked on their hands and knees, crawling along tunnels and thin, sloping coal veins, lighted only by the meager flicker from carbide lamps attached to the front of their helmets.

Coal was discovered on Squak Mountain in Issaquah in 1859, but it wasn't until 1862 that L.B. Andrews and W.W. Perkins brought several loads to Seattle. The next year coal was found in Coal Creek on the west side of Cougar Mountain.

Newcastle became the center of the newly established industry by the late 1860s and early 1870s, with the towns of Coal Creek and Coalfield nearby. Mine tunnels soon were dug throughout what is now known as the Issaquah Alps between Issaquah and Lake Washington.

Local newspapers referred to King County as the Pennsylvania of the West.

It was a time when Seattle was essentially a port of call for shipping timber from the vast forests that blanketed the Eastside foothills. Underneath much of that land was coal, millions of tons of black diamonds.

At first, the coal was moved via tramways, wagons, canoes and barges to docks at King and Pike streets in Seattle, where it was loaded onto ships bound for San Francisco and, later, to Hawaii and Australia. In 1878 the Seattle and Walla Walla Railroad was punched through to the mines, but it wasn't until a few years later when the Northern Pacific Railroad connected to the area that the national-market boom began.

By the 1880s coal was king and Newcastle was the second-largest city in King County, rivaled only by Seattle. The thriving community was producing about 200,000 tons of coal annually.

Newcastle's fame had spread to the extent that when President Rutherford B. Hayes came to Washington Territory in 1880, accompanied by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of Civil War fame, he insisted on visiting Newcastle.

Death lurked in the dark, damp and cold working spaces of the deep mines. Methane gas and dust explosions, cave-ins and accidents were not common but occurred often enough to take a toll. Four men were killed and four others seriously injured in an explosion in October 1894.

Quentin Hyatt was the last miner killed in Newcastle, while working for the B & R Co. in 1951. That company closed the last diggings at Newcastle in 1963, according to "The Coals of Newcastle," a book by Richard McDonald and Lucile McDonald.

By the mid-1960s, a string of mining companies - Pacific Coast Coal, Lake Washington Coal, Seattle Coal and Strain Coal - had removed more than 10 million tons of coal from the Newcastle fields. But long before that, nature began regenerating the raped land.

Little is left to remind today's generation of what once was the small area's 15 minutes of fame. A 117-year-old wood-frame structure known as the Baima house still stands in today's Newcastle, along with a small segment of the foundation of a hotel, a sealed-off entrance to a tunnel, piles of slag and rock now covered with alder and ferns, a tipple (an apparatus for emptying coal) and concrete foundations for a steam-powered hoisting engine at the Ford Slope.

The memories of those days, however, linger in the minds of the hundreds of descendants of those pioneers.

And several thousand people show up for the annual Return to Newcastle Days, started 16 years ago. The event started as a way to draw interest to the Cougar Mountain Regional Wildland Park, where abandoned coal mines pockmark the mountainside, but eventually turned into a history lesson on the coal-boom days. This year the event will be held June 7. Information from "The Coals of Newcastle," by Richard McDonald and Lucile McDonald, is included in this report.