The Tragedy at the Seattle Mine
A mine worker falls through a sinkhole into a subterranean coal fire at Newcastle.
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.
On Tuesday afternoon a terrible accident occurred at Newcastle, whereby a man was roasted alive. A month or so ago, while forest fires were raging, a burning tree fell into an old, worked-out portion of the Seattle mine and set the coal on fire. Men had been employed in fighting it. While working Tuesday afternoon, the ground caved and let William Laws down through to his hips in the burning coal, and before he could extricate himself, he had burned to death. The deceased was a Scotchman, 45 years of age, and leaves a wife and two children who were dependent upon his labor.
“The ground caved and let William Laws down through to his hips in the burning coal, and before he could extricate himself he had burned to death.”
This industrial tragedy at the Newcastle coal mines highlights the extreme hazards of early Washington resource extraction. Today, the site of these mines is largely reclaimed as parkland and suburbs, obscuring the dangerous, visceral reality of the labor that once powered the region's growth.
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