Franklin—Growth and Struggles of Company Coal Town

Part I—The Rest of the Story

By MaryLynn Strickland

A couple of miles east of Black Diamond is the town of Franklin, now a ghost town but once the site of the Oregon Improvement Company’s mine.  Inhabitants were made up of immigrants mostly Welsh, English, Irish, Italian and Scots.  Other European immigrants included Swedes, Poles and Austrians.  When the Seattle to Walla Walla Railroad was extended to Franklin, coal was shipped to San Francisco and the operations grew.

Picture property of Black Diamond Museum, permission granted for use in this purpose.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 18, 1891, described Franklin thus:

Franklin is blessed with one of the most beautiful sites in Washington, though it is the last place a real estate man would choose for a townsite.  It clings to the steep side of a mountain which rises precipitously from the right bank of the raging, roaring, tumbling Green river (sic).  The main part of the town is so high up the mountain that the railroad has to crawl up the side to the tail of a Y and then turn back again to reach the required elevation.  The straggling main street has in one place been cut out of the hillside, and the level space thus acquired is so narrow that the houses on the lower side have one wall almost hanging over the edge of a precipice, while on the other side the houses are perched high up on the steep banks. . .

 The lower town is on a level bench which is reached from above by flights of steep, uneven, wooden stairs, about 100 feet high, handing from the face of the rocky cliffs.  At several points along these cliffs small waterfalls leap to join the torrent below, breaking into white foam in their mad descent. . .

Beyond, to the south, mountain rises above mountain in glorious confusion, . . Green river rushes between two great walls of rock. . .Its bed is filled with giant rocks, which its restless waters have worn into all manner of fantastic forms. . . .
From the western end of the town Mount Rainier can be seen, forty miles distant, due south, towering above the intervening ridges like a giant, his whiteness forming a beautiful contrast to their rich, dark green covering. 

The paper continues, “It is into such a scene that discord has intruded.” ¹

Franklin had been out producing its neighbors—Black Diamond, Gilman and Newcastle—but by January, 1891, output had been reduced because the company was using much of its force to develop another vein.  In the community of about 500 people, only 40 or 50 men were working on the new vein.  The Oregon Improvement Company had to determine if it would continue with the “old men who have been living in this section for years and continue the long experience of petty strikes, high wages, union dictation, consequent lack of discipline. . .or shall we bring in an entirely new force of men who will make a contract to work for reasonable wages and be amenable to discipline?”²  The company decided to bring new men; “if the old men would sign the contract and abide by it, well and good; but in case they should refuse, as would probably be the case, have others ready to take their places.”³

T. B. Corey, ex-superintendent of the Franklin mine went back east and recruited workers and their families to come work in Franklin.  The men he recruited were black workers from Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and Indiana.  The men assembled in St Louis, Missouri, where they were loaded onto a train and headed west. The black miners were promised good jobs with good wages; they were not told that they were strikebreakers.

The first that people in Franklin had any indication of what was about to happen was a letter informing them that the train was crossing the mountains.  It came across on Stampede Pass; women and children were taken into Seattle and the men continued by train to Palmer Junction, about 2 ½ miles from Franklin.  There, in the middle of the night, the men were off loaded, handed rifles and marched through the woods to Franklin.  They were being guarded by armed white men, supposedly Pinkertons.  When someone asked why they needed rifles to mine coal, they were told there were wild animals in the woods.

There were incidents of name calling and minor skirmishes.  The company had fenced the whites out of the main parts of town and the guards harassed and intimidated the white miners and their families.  At one point the Tacoma Militia was called to control and disarm everyone.

Picture property of Black Diamond Museum, permission granted for use in this purpose.

Meanwhile, other trainloads of workers arrived at night. White workers and their families moved to Black Diamond, Palmer, Newcastle or other communities where work could be found.  In the book, Black Diamond: Mining the Memories, Cora Jones Flyzik related the incident when her family left Franklin to go to Palmer. Cora was about five years old and her mother had given birth to a baby just three weeks earlier.  After dinner the family left and reached a point where they had to cross the train tracks.  When they heard a train whistle they knew they didn’t have time to cross so they hid down in a gulch below the train tracks.  Cora’s mother fell and hurt herself but she had to lie there on the ground cradling the baby.

The train that had been coming stopped right there, the doors opened and black people got out.  Cora’s father hushed his family because they didn’t know what was going to happen with the people on the train.  After a while the black people got back on the train and went on to Franklin; Cora’s family went on to Palmer.

I read this account several years ago and the experience of that little girl stayed with me.  Then, a few weeks ago I met Ethel Craven Sweet an African American lady who lives in my apartment building.  At a pot luck dinner she began telling how her family came from the mid-West in the 1890s to mine coal.  She knew the history of the mining industry and the black miners’ involvement.  When she mentioned that her family had gone to Roslyn rather than coming to Franklin, I suddenly realized I was hearing the rest of the story.  How rare to be touched by both sides of an historic event such as that.

After a few months things settled down and everyone got back to work.  Don Mason, volunteer at the Black Diamond Museum, pointed out that at Franklin there was no segregation; black and white worked next to each other, lived next to each other, even drank in the same saloon.

I became intrigued by Franklin when I discovered the names of men who died in a disaster.  Sometime later I was given a file of notes and clippings nearly an inch thick; a collection from SKCGS researchers dating back to 1987 with newspaper articles about Boy Scout projects and archaeological digs even earlier.

Part II, to be on this blog in the near future, will relate the Franklin Fire of 1894, in which 37 men died.

1. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 18, 1891, page 2
2. Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 17, 1891, page 1
3. Ibid.

MaryLynn Strickland