Bill Kombol

Last week’s column highlighted the origins of the three primary styles of football played worldwide – soccer, rugby, and the football variants played in the U.S., Canada, and Australia. While football now dominates American sports culture, it wasn’t always this way, particularly in mining communities like Black Diamond with their large immigrant populations. Black Diamond’s […]

On Tuesday, December 2, 1975, the skies opened up, and the rains poured down, precipitating catastrophic flooding of the Cedar River throughout lower Maple Valley. Bill Ziegner, editor of the Voice of the Valley, described the disaster on the newspaper’s front page. “The beautiful, gentle summer Cedar River turned into an ugly, roaring, vicious giant last week as it wrought millions of dollars of devastation to homes and properties along its banks.”

When this December 1959 photo of Grover Smail, left, and George Savicke was taken in the Rogers No. 1 mine, near the Cedar River, the new operation had been opened for less than twelve months. Sixteen years later, its successor, Rogers No. 3 on the Ravensdale side, closed on December 17, 1975. That date marked the end of nearly 122 years of underground coal mining in Washington. The territory’s first mine was launched in 1853 at Bellingham Bay, on a coal seam discovered by Captain William Pattle.

Just minutes after the portal opening to the Rogers #3 mine was sealed shut with a dynamite blast, a group of miners watched residual smoke rise from the last underground coal mine in Washington state. The time and date – December 17, 1975, at 2:30 pm – when Palmer Coking Coal Company’s Ravensdale operation closed […]

For nearly 70 years, this building has served as the mine office of Palmer Coking Coal. While Palmer closed its last underground coal mine 50 years ago, and left the coal industry 40 years back, the company has long served South King County with a wide variety of sand, gravel, and landscape materials. This Snowmageddon […]

As North America prepares to welcome a record 48 teams to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, it’s fun to look back 100 years to local soccer in 1926. Black Diamond’s teams were typically a tough group of players made up of the sons of coal-mining immigrants, primarily British and Italian. Sadly, the Italian national soccer […]

It’s in a place where the Green River carved a deep gorge through 50 million years of geologic history, revealing 18 coal seams. It’s also a site of amazing scenic beauty that began attracting visitors even before coal mining in nearby Franklin drew to a close in the early 1920s. And where mossy trees overlook […]

Coal mining was not simply hard work — it was dangerous work in a hazardous environment, hundreds of feet underground. Even with the most stringent safety

Have you ever wondered what your home looked like in the distant past? If it was built before the 1980s, you may be in luck. The three photos featured abov

It’s one of King County’s newest protected forests, but in its day, Lady Dyar’s Little Lake Ranch was a Wedding Wonderland like no other. Over 30+ years, this secluded site in the foothills east of Enumclaw hosted thousands of weddings, co-witnessed by the swans, peacocks, and frogs that called “Little Lake” home. In the early […]