Gem of a museum
In a revitalized Black Diamond, the past lives on

Originally published Saturday, December 14, 1996

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

There was a time when everyone out in Black Diamond was known by a nickname.

Those were simpler days, when a Frenchman known as "Flying Frog" transported hard-drinking coal miners and liquor at breakneck speeds in his Model T over the rough roads between Black Diamond and Ravensdale.

Emil "Flying Frog" Raisin is gone now. So is Edward "Catfish" Banchero,and hundreds of others born or raised in and around Black Diamond when coal was king and everyone had a nickname.

As recently as 10 years ago, Black Diamond was a self-contained "town out in the country" where Seattleites drove to buy fresh-baked bread from a little brick oven bakery. The tiny bakery has tripled production and now is attached to a busy delicatessen, and tour buses are fixtures along Railroad Avenue. More businesses are growing on the edges of town, and there's talk of several subdivisions and hundreds more homes coming.

"B.D.," as it's still called by the old-timers, has just about transformed from an "ex-urb" to a suburb. Hundreds of trucks rumble coal to the nearby rail head as Black Diamond comes to life again.

And there's a small irony in the resurgence of this small town. As production at a new open-pit mine grows dramatically every year, the same Black Diamond old-timers who have stayed near their roots and helped resurrectits boomtown image, are themselves fading away.

"Due to lack of interest, the annual old-timers picnic will not take placethis year," the poignant notation in the Black Diamond Historical Society monthly newsletter read. "There were not enough in attendance at the last meeting to make any kind of good judgment on the picnic. It was decided to shelve the matter."

This is the time of year the old-timers always had their picnic. "It was mostly a chance to just sit around and visit and talk about the old days and get brought up-to-date about new grandchildren and who was in the hospital andwho had moved and who had died," said Ann Steiert, who puts together the monthly newsletter.

Before this year was even half gone, there were more visitors to the Black Diamond Historical Society Museum than the 3,500 souls who lived and worked in"B.D." in its turn-of-the-century heyday. Black Diamond is 35 miles southeast of Seattle on State Route 169 (Maple Valley Highway).

As the old-timers have dwindled in number, those remaining have worked thatmuch harder to keep Black Diamond alive. They have literally dug-in and remodeled the town's old rail depot into a highly successful historical museum, complete with a full-size coal mine mock-up beneath the old building.

"It started back about 1976, as we approached the U.S. Bicentennial. The mayor at the time came to some of us old-timers and asked if we wanted to be involved in some sort of bicentennial project. We decided to form the (historical) society," said Carl Steiert, 80, Ann's husband.

"We met at the city hall at first. This old depot was being used as storage for the water department. When we decided to make the depot our project, we just sort of started at the far end and pushed!"

They've pushed it up, down, sideways and inside-out, ripping out dropped ceilings to restore old high-ceiling rooms, putting on additions to house moremuseum exhibits, even burrowing beneath the old depot and shoring it up with mine timbers to create a mock-up of a turn-of-the-century mine tunnel.

Ann and Carl and a handful of others launched a weekly "Thursday Work Crew" that brought in volunteer workers with the promise of more work than they could hope to handle for no pay. A hot, home-cooked lunch and a break whenever you wanted to set a spell and rest your retired body was about all they could promise.

Ted Barner, at 84, is one of most senior seniors, with 19 years of work in the mines under his belt. "My wife came to one of the early meetings and whenthey asked for volunteers to work, she volunteered ME!" he quipped. "Been coming for the free lunch ever since."

Bob Eaton, a retired Navy and City Light worker and transplanted Massachusetts native, said that he got himself drafted when he began nosing around the depot work project. Now he's even president of the Historical Society.

"We're not in debt, but then, we don't have any funding to speak of, either," he said, standing ankle-deep in a clay hole that will be the lower level of another depot/museum addition. "If we don't have the money or the materials, we don't start a project.

"None of us is a real expert; we just work ... and not real fast," he said.

Maybe not, but what they have nailed, welded, taped, glued and otherwise put together in a decade of Thursdays is a delightful eclectica of everyone's grandmother's attic and grandfather's workbench. There's your grandmother's kitchen not far from a 1900s barbershop and a corner from a one-room schoolhouse.

Outside, where you might have waited for the Pacific Coast Coal Co. train to Seattle in the old days, a rebuilt caboose serves as a reminder of that tenuous link. Much of the caboose interior was reproduced by wood shop classesat Tahoma High School in nearby Maple Valley.

Today, giant trucks haul coal from the new John Henry No. 1 mine to unit train rail cars up at what used to be Ravensdale. From there, Black Diamond's coal - they say there's more than 600 million tons still above 6,000 feet and another 5 billion tons below that - is hauled up to British Columbia for loading onto ships bound for Japan and other Pacific Rim nations. Mitsubishi Industries happens to be part-owner of the new mine operation.

And as Black Diamond's coal once again moves out to stoke new industries, the Thursday crew keeps the home fires burning in the old depot. "Our addition will house a collection of old photos, with room for a slide show fortour groups, and we're hoping a working blacksmith shop and a collection of old machine tools and antique car motors and parts," said Eaton. Even as

he spoke, several men worked outside in a light rain, fitting wood sills atop a new foundation wall.

Inside the old baggage room that serves somewhat as a kitchen for the work crews, the stern countenance of a bushy-browed man looks down from an old picture frame. "Some of the descendants of the original mine owners asked me if we didn't want some old pictures ... thought maybe we might know who they were because they sure didn't," said Carl, nodding to the faded photo of JohnL. Lewis, patriarch of the United Mine Workers of America. Some of the other items track back to the Big Strike of 1921, and the "Morganville" community built by striking families forced out of company homes.

A nearby wall map with connect-the-dot threads illustrates Black Diamond's strong links to Wales, Ireland, Poland, Finland, Austria, Italy, Yugoslavia and other countries. An old mine sign reads "DANGER" in 16 languages. Various fraternal order badges and ribbons, some with sepia-toned reproductions and foreign-language inscriptions, speak to the original ethnic mix as well as the mining work ethic.

"We work with the state's Office of Historic Preservation, but their people get upset with our stuff being so close together," Ann said. "It's not your standard sort of museum presentation, partly because we've got so much stuff and not much room to store it. Besides, if someone donates some oldpieces to us, they want to see it displayed, too."

Even some of the rose bushes outside the depot are descended from bushes brought from Italy and originally planted at the old meat market down RailroadAvenue, she explained.

The Thursday Work Crew has planted, transplanted and mined enough history to keep Old Black Diamond alive for many years to come.