The Boomtown Frontier: A Steam-Powered Excursion into Kent and Black Diamond

At 9 o'clock Saturday morning, a special excursion train pulled out from the Columbia and Puget Sound railroad depot, bound for the settlements along the line of the recently built extension up the Cedar and Green rivers. The guests numbered eighty or a hundred, including Mayor Leary and others. To Kent, the country is in a high state of cultivation. The city gradually loses itself in the country. A ride over this piece of road will dissipate the too common idea that there is no agricultural land near Puget Sound. Kent furnishes a real surprise; there seems to be little there to sustain a town, and yet no old established town in the Territory is growing faster. Cedar Mountain, nineteen miles from Seattle, is where all is new. A sawmill is cutting lumber for the building of the town; a large store building has been erected, and a hotel. A constant development of the mine is going on, until an output of a hundred tons a day has been reached. Black Diamond is brand new. Three months ago it consisted of a few tents and three log houses. It now contains a score or more of tents, the same log houses, and a half-dozen frame buildings. The townsite has been platted, and, judging by what has already been done, will be built on good principles. The railroad has been extended from Black Diamond to Franklin, three miles. That part of the road is the most attractive on the entire line. It extends along Green river, which pours in a torrent a hundred and fifty feet below, while the bluff on the other side of the track rises almost perpendicularly from fifty to a hundred feet higher. The coal properties there are developing rapidly, with a view to the shipment from them of a thousand tons of coal a day.