Miners Day Sign on the way to the event Join SKCGS at Black Diamond Miners Day! We'll be there all day. Early birds can show up around 7 am to help us set up, or show up any time before 4 to help us greet people, answer their questions, or ask them about their family history.  At 4 pm, as the event ends, we would welcome help to pack up  and clean up.  Please write to Outreach@skcgs.org to volunteer.  Chalk drawing from 2023 Miners Day Black Diamond Area a Favorite Topic Over the history of SKCGS Blog and our previous newsletter, the Black Diamond and Franklin Mine areas have been a great source for stories.  We are especially grateful for the volumes of information available at the Black Diamond Museum and Historical Society. People who live in South King County, especially on the eastern side are familiar with the coal mining communities of Newcastle, Renton, and Black Diamond; some may even remember the names of Franklin, Cedar Mountain and other towns from l...

Dr. Janice Lovelace was the featured speaker this afternoon, October 24, 2021, at a joint meeting hosted by the Black Diamond Historical Society and South King County Genealogical Society, on Black Miners in the West.   The event was well attended with people from all over the United States who have an interest in the heritage of the Black miners who came west in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Notes from the meeting:  https://skcgs.groups.io/g/Society/message/1934  . People who live in South King County, especially on the eastern side are familiar with the coal mining communities of Newcastle, Renton, and Black Diamond; some may even remember the names of Franklin, Cedar Mountain and other towns from long ago. Franklin WA ~ Cemetery ~Abandoned Mining Town by vikisuzan, (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) I've had an interest in the mining operations at Franklin ever since I discovered the names of the 37 men who died in the mine fire of August 24, 1894.  That lead to other...

  SUICE, SOOS, OR SUISE CREEK?   EARLY IMMIGRANTS   AND THEIR STORIES The Cemetery In 1988, Louise (Melin) Merritt began gathering records of those buried in the Suise Creek Cemetery in preparation for publication of an Obituary Book in cooperation with the South King County Genealogical Society. “The cemetery was originally located above Suise Creek on SE 240th” [ 1 ] “In 1903, bodies were moved by horse and wagon from the old to the new burial grounds . . ..” located at SE 256th and 132nd Ave SE. [ 2 ] “A few years later some sort of a dispute arose between the Finns and the other Scandinavians, and henceforth most of the Swedes and Norwegians took their business elsewhere. They are predominately buried in the old Meridian Cemetery or the Hillcrest Cemetery in Kent, Washington” [ 3 ] Finnish Immigrants As the project progressed, Mrs. Merritt decided to compile a his...

by Valorie Zimmerman You're busy, I know. You barely have time to do your genealogy work. So why would you take on yet another job? It's really quite simple. Think about how you want to make the world a better place, and make your life richer and more valuable. Working with partners whom you respect has a lot of value in itself. However, bringing a big project to fruition with those people feels incredible! And there is still time to do genealogy research. Almost a year ago, two women whom I barely knew - Dorothy Pretare and Marilyn Schunke - and I began meeting to review and improve our society bylaws. Looking back, I see that we were extraordinarily well matched for the work, although we didn't realize that at first. Fortunately they both knew how to start, which was with lots of research. We reached out to our contacts in and out of SKCGS, to get our Articles of Incorporation, all the old SKCGS Bylaws we could find, as well as many other Washington and US so...

Can you identify the men in this photo? This photograph was taken sometime in the 1920’s or 1930’s in Franklin, King County, Washington. It is of two men who are probably not miners, due to the style of their dress. The standing man is simply in trousers and no particular footwear, meaning he and probably the second man were visitors to the mine. Perhaps they were businessmen or engineers come to visit to see if the mine was worth keeping open. The mine entrance is to the “Gem Mine #3”, the third mine of this name. The first one was the biggest and was on the Green River. The second was a bit further down river and this one, the third, was the smallest and was above the river, between it and the railroad tracks, below the present-day track to the Franklin Cemetery. This photo is part of a larger photo, the rest of which is trees and background, and which hangs in the Black Diamond Historical Museum . The “gas” sign was often posted even if there was no danger of gas as it sc...

Part II—Fire Spreads Death in Franklin Mine By MaryLynn Strickland By 1894 the miners of Franklin were working side by side—people who had migrated from Pennsylvania and Ohio, immigrants from Wales and England, single young Italian men hoping to earn enough money to bring their families to the US and black miners who had been “imported” from the mid-West in 1891.   Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper articles in 1894 related stories of miners striking throughout the United States.  Miners in Roslyn, Washington, had become divided over a wage reduction.  The August 18 paper reported that black miners had accepted the reduction; white miners were holding out and there was talk of moving black miners from Franklin to Roslyn.  Other news of the world dominated the front page of each issue. Picture property of Black Diamond Museum, permission granted for this purpose But “Stifled by Smoke” was the headline on the front page of the August 25, 1894, is...

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 t...

  by Katie Hanzeli “If it wasn’t for coal, there never would have been a Black Diamond, Washington.” 1 About 1885, the Black Diamond Coal Company of California sent Morgan Morgan, their superintendent and Mr. P. B. Cornwall, the company’s president up North to check out the prospect of moving its entire operation from Nortonville to what is now Black Diamond, Washington. Coal, good quality coal, had been discovered in Newcastle, just North of there and explorations showed that even more was to be had. Morgan and Cornwall liked what they saw. The mostly Welsh and some Italian employees, their families and all the equipment were packed up, lock, stock and barrel, and moved to Washington. Even before coal became king, there were homesteaders nearby, who had to go to Seattle via Covington to get supplies. Everything else they grew themselves, including tobacco. 2 They had been settled in the area since the early 1870’s. Welsh, Italians, Slovenians, British and other national...