Bill Kombol

One of the more interesting legacies of coal mining in South King County were the stockpiles of coal slag that burned for decades and created a landscape product called red cinders. The story began in the 1880s when miners found rich seams of the black-colored ‘diamonds’ that gave the area’s first coal mining town its name––Black Diamond.

Coal has been mined in South King County since 1885 after the Columbia & Puget Sound Railroad was extended up the Cedar River Valley through Black Diamond to nearby Franklin, located adjacent to the Green River Gorge. During the first 60 years, almost all mining was conducted underground through labyrinth systems of subterranean tunnels that followed the coal seams. In most parts of the country, sedimentary coal seams lay horizontally. However in the Pacific Northwest, due to the uplift of the Cascade Mountain range, the coal tilts at angles, meaning the veins of black diamonds angle anywhere from 20 degrees to 90 degrees, in the latter case vertical to the earth’s surface.

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Franklin was developed for coal mining and operated as a company town from 1885 to 1922. Franklin’s purpose was linked to 53-million-year-old coal seams discovered by Victor Tull in 1882. The town was named after Benjamin Franklin. The Oregon Improvement Company in cooperation with the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company induced the Columbia & Puget […]

When this King County Assessor photo was taken on April 10, 1940, the Selleck school building was just 10 years old. This modern brick structure was built on the site of the original schoolhouse that burned to the ground in 1929. It served children of the hundreds of workers who staffed the sawmill and facilities of Pacific States Lumber Company.

This 1914 photo of Black Diamond’s first Presbyterian Church was featured on a post card created by Holden Studio, Black Diamond’s primary photographer during its early year. Morgan Morgan, the Superintendent of the Black Diamond Coal Mining Co. which developed the town, declared that one church, the Congregational was sufficient. That original church was located on Baker Street at the site of the historic fire station in the future slated to be part of the Black Diamond Museum.

For the first 25 years of its existence, only the Congregational Church was allowed in the coal mining town of Black Diamond, but “everybody went to the same church, Catholics and all,” according to Dusalina Cavaletto. About every two to three months Catholic Masses were held in the old show hall when a priest was paid to travel by train from Mount Virgin Church in Seattle and parishioners paid him for coming using the opportunity to baptize their children.

Last week’s column featured a 1914 photo of Black Diamond’s First Presbyterian Church. Located at what is now 4 th Avenue and Lawson Street, it was built about the same time as St. Barbara’s Catholic Church situated 250 yards to the northeast.

Robert Gerald (Bob) Kuzaro, seen falling a tree in 1982, was born in Black Diamond on February 11, 1924. His mother, Roxie (Kaluzny) Kuzaro died from hemorrhages within hours after giving birth to Bob, her twelfth child. His father, Joseph was a coal miner, first in Franklin and later in Black Diamond. Joe Kuzaro also died tragically, in December 1941 a year and a half after suffering a debilitating injury in the Strain Company’s Ginder Lake Mine, located north of Black Diamond and west of Lake 12. Joseph and Roxie (Kaluzny) Kuzaro were of Polish descent and are buried in Franklin’s Our Lady of Holy Rosary Cemetery, adjacent to the Catholic Church where they were married in 1905. That church was later razed by burning after Franklin’s decline as a coal mining town.

Archie Eltz was the smartest coal miner this columnist ever knew. Archie had a mind like a steel trap and decades later could recite minute details of coal mine history. During two hours of interviews conducted in February and August 1985, Eltz remembered scenes and events stretching back to the 1920s with the conversation’s running […]