The Miner's Strange Discovery
A miner in Carbonado taps into a prehistoric oven formed by a subterranean fire and ancient trees.
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.
Returning from the funeral of David Lister, Mr. Robert Wingate recalled that Lister had used some of the oldest coke ever discovered. While Wingate was superintendent at the coal mines in Carbonado, a miner working upward through a coal chute struck his pick into an opening and found a deluge of water pouring down. It turned out that a surface fire many years prior had burned out an edge of the coal vein, creating an oven where the coal was coked. The fire was then quenched by rain, and centuries later, trees grew over the site. Based on the growth of the trees, the coke was estimated to be at least five hundred years old. Mr. Wingate brought a hundred pounds to Tacoma for Mr. Lister to use, who pronounced it as good as any modern fuel.
“This coke was at least five hundred years old... a surface fire many years ago had burned out the upper edge of the vein.”
This story highlights the deep geological history of coal mining in Washington State, which fueled the state's early industrialization. It serves as a reminder that the fuel driving the machines of the 1890s was pulled from landscapes with histories far deeper than the cities built upon them.
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