Black Diamond NOW

Where Would You Rather Work Circa 1900 - 1910?

Let's say it's 1900 and you just arrived to our little corner of world.  Where would you want to settle in and seek employment?  Enumclaw was up and coming with logging jobs aplenty.  Or, you could make your way to Black Diamond and Franklin in search of black gold in the coal mines.  Whether it be in the woods or in the mines, both jobs were mighty dangerous and physically taxing - and neither job paid very well either.

What did it look like being down in the mines?  Here are a couple of examples from this era.

Image courtesy Washington State Historical Society, 2018.2.102, circa 1910

Looks awfully cramped but still enough room for horses.  And you weren't going to get rained on or frozen by snow and ice either.

Image courtesy Washington State Historical Society, 2014.45.1.8, circa 1913

With the high risk of explosions, I didn't think that they allowed "smoke breaks" in the mines.  The above photo taken from a mine in Wilkeson shows one of the miners smoking a pipe.  Still looks awfully cramped.  On the plus side for mining - at least miners stayed put in one location day after day.  If you were single, you often stayed in a room at one of the hotels in town.  In Black Diamond, I think we at one time had three or four hotels with lodging for singles.  Even better, if you were married, you got to come home each night to family and home cooking.

For loggers, it was different.  Being out in the elements meant getting wet and cold, particularly your hands.  Work spaces were in the wide open but with lots of climbing up, over and around stumps, logs and debris.

Image courtesy Museum of History & Industry, 1983.10.7394, Axtell photographer, circa 1905

Horse power was used in logging too.

Image courtesy White River Valley Museum, PO-1205, circa 1903

The above photo shows a log being drug along a skid road by a team of horses for the Crow Mill, located 1/2 mile south of where Kent Meridian High School is today.  Among the biggest differences between logging and coal mining, however, were accommodations.  Where you logged kept moving.  Housing was typically all male, mobile and very cramped.  Not a lot of comforts of home and certainly no home cooking.

Image courtesy University of Washington Libraries, IND0154, Darius Kinsey photographer, circa 1892

As the timber industry grew and labor availability tightened, improvements were made in housing and meals, but still pretty hard to have a family life.

And what would your choice be during this era - coal miner or logger?  Whatever your choice, they were both low pay, physically tough and very dangerous.

 

 

Logging in Lester Circa 1895

The ghost town of Lester was established just west of Stampede Pass in 1891.  We know it as a railroad town, built to service the Northern Pacific Railroad with fuel (water and coal) and a roundhouse providing critical locomotive and railcar maintenance before and after crossing the pass.  But where mainline railroads passed through timbered land, logging would soon follow.  With the NP's permission, connections by logging railroads and sawmills could be made along the way.  And so it was for logging along the hillsides surrounding Lester beginning in the late 1890's.

Image courtesy White River Valley Museum, Gift of Keith Vallier,  PO-01728, John D. Cress photographer, circa 1890's

With the Green River Valley and Lester below, the Lester Logging Company railroad appears to have had a pretty good view of Mt. Rainier too!  Not long thereafter, the Morgan Lumber Co. owned by Elmer Morgan, built a sawmill and town a few miles west of Lester known as Nagrom, which is backwards for mill owner Morgan's name - who also happened to be the postmaster and owner of the Morgan General Store in Lester. 

Whoever said that "Connections and Cash" weren't everything?

Kent Lumber Company and Mill Creek Pond

Established in 1881, the Kent Lumber Company was among the first sawmills in south King County.  Located at the base of east hill along what is now Hwy 516 and Kent Kangley road, near where the Kent Senior Center now sits, the mill was able to access timber grown in both the valley and all along the crest of the hill up above.  And the good news, Mill Creek could be used to transport logs from east hill down the canyon to the mill, with area enough for a mill pond next to the sawmill below.  No road building required and plenty of room for log storage.  The following photo taken in 1885 is among the earliest local timber industry photos on record, at least that I have found.

Image courtesy White River Valley Museum, Gift of Rose Wilson, PO-01209, Clarks Photo Studio, circa 1885

If you've driven down Kent Kangley into the valley, you are familiar with how steep the canyon is - and how perfect as a freeway for transporting logs it could be.  Ah, the gift of gravity and flowing water.  It appears that a sort of sluice was built down which logs could be pushed, pulled and or floated down the creek into the pond.  Since valley timber was often not high quality given floods that periodically afflicted the area, having east hill timber available to the mill was a big bonus.  I guess we know how the creek and pond got their name - Mill Creek.

The "First Family" of Lake Sawyer

If one family were to be given the honorary title "First Family" of Lake Sawyer, in both name and deed, it would have to be the Carl M. Hanson family.  Swedish immigrants who found their way to Seattle in 1884, Hanson filed a timber claim in 1886 on160 acres at the north end of Lake Sawyer, including the lakeside property where Judy and I now have our home.  Born into a sawmill family in Sweden, Hanson had his sights set on becoming a major player in the pacific northwest timber industry.  Ironically, Hanson and his three sons built their first sawmill not on Lake Sawyer but on Lake Wilderness. 

Image courtesy Maple Valley Historical Society and King County Snapshots, 85.134.1, circa 1887 - 1889

It appears that this photo was taken from the northwest end of the lake looking south from the area now home to the Lake Wilderness Lodge and Park.  If you look closely at the far end, you can see what appears to be sawmill structures.  Not ones to sit still, the Hanson's logged but 5 acres of Lake Sawyer area land and operated the Lake Wilderness mill only until 1889, when they purchased and transferred operations to the White River Sawmill in Enumclaw.  In so doing, they built a major family legacy with the success of the White River mill.  It's interesting to note that even though the mill was eventually sold to Weyerhaeuser, the Hanson family continued to operate it for many years thereafter, leaving the timber supply responsibility with Weyerhaeuser. 

Even though the Hanson family moved their lumber business to Enumclaw, they also left a significant legacy at Lake Sawyer becoming the first to build a significant cabin on the lake in 1926 where they retained ownership for many years.  Today, you can still see the cabin much as it looked when built.  Following are a couple of current photos of the peninsula and cabin.

You can barely see the cabin at the point of the peninsula hidden among the snow covered trees.  We are very fortunately to have these as our views today.  And the good news, the peninsula is now held as a conservation area by current owners and cannot be developed.

For more about Lake Sawyer's First Family, follow this link to Hanson Family by Bill Kombol.

Early Logging - These Guys Will Try Anything

Faced with huge timber on steep hillsides, early loggers were confronted with enormous challenges.  Timber was cheap, but getting logs cut and transported to a mill, where you could get paid, was the problem.  Tools at your disposal before steam donkeys arrived on the scene included cross cut saws and hand axes with teams of horses and oxen as your principle source of power.  First there were skid roads for dragging logs to a mill or body of water, followed by pole roads and then some crude narrow gauge rail - all to make it easier to transport these behemoths.  Always in search of a better way, these guys tried just about anything to make it easier and cheaper, and eventually safer too.  Following is one of the more unusual means of log transport that I have seen.

Image courtesy Washington State Historical Society, 1927.19.8, circa 1890 

Here we have a log 151 feet long (8,000 board feet) loaded on two small flat cars pulled by oxen or horse power.  Why they kept this log at its full length rather than bucking into shorter lengths is beyond me.  That must have been one heck of challenge to get loaded onto these flat cars.  And then, navigate your way around curves in the rail line?  Perhaps they were going to use this log for building a bridge and needed to span a long distance.  Judging by the "suits" that had their photo taken with this log, it must have been for something special.

It looks like this area was ravaged by fire at some point.