Life Inside the Coal Company’s Town
A rare glimpse into the daily rhythm, infrastructure, and isolation of Franklin, a booming King County coal town in the summer of 1888.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
Franklin, located 33 miles southeast of Seattle on the Cedar river extension of the Columbia & Puget Sound railroad, is a town built entirely around the 'black diamonds' of the earth. Situated on a steep hillside above the Green River, the town spans a cantilever bridge constructed at a cost of $13,000, standing 90 feet above the riverbed. The settlement was founded about three years ago, and today it holds 1,000 inhabitants, with 600 men employed in the mines. The company owns all the realty, including 50 modern dwellings, log cabins, and the main company store. The company manages every aspect of life, from the ventilation fans—which change the air every 15 minutes—to the water supply pumped from the river into large reservoirs. Residents live in company-provided housing: large eight-room homes renting for $10 per month and smaller four-room houses for $8, with no taxes or water bills. The work is dangerous, but the company provides a traveling stairway for the men to move between levels, partitioned off from the coal department for safety. Currently, the mines produce 700 tons of coal per day, destined for steam power along the coast.
“The miners are chiefly natives of Wales, Scotland and England... the Welsh are natural coal miners, and good ones.”
Franklin was a quintessential 'company town' where the employer owned the houses, the utilities, and the streets. Its history mirrors the tension in modern Seattle between corporate growth and the living conditions of the workforce, serving as a reminder that the city's foundation was built on intensive resource extraction and extreme industrial paternalism.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.