Bicycling along the Cedar River Trail between Renton and Maple Valley, I often pass this old two-story building across the road that's home to a compost and landscape material business.
It's the biggest and most imposing structure in the suburbs that are sprawling into the rural area between the two towns, and I always thought that it was the former site of a school, or a county jail or something.
When I took the time to ask at the Renton History Museum a few weeks ago, I learned it's another remnant of the once-lucrative coal mining industry that drove commerce in the hills east of Seattle.
Coal
The Pacific Coast Coal Company administrative office and machine shop building is the only structure surviving intact from the coal boom in the Cedar River Valley. It's about 5-1/2 miles from the Cedar River bike trail terminus in Renton. The building served a coal mine in the hill behind it.
The two-story post and beam industrial building was constructed in 1927, according to HistoryLink.org, where it is described:
The long rectangular two-story post and beam industrial building features large windows to admit light into the workspaces, corrugated galvanized iron siding, and a flat roof.
When the mine closed in 1941, the washroom, trestle and other buildings at the site were torn down.
Pacific Coast Coal has a long history of mining east of Seattle. The old “Baima Cabin” in Newcastle, which I visited a while back, is the sole survivor of a company town that's long-since vanished. The company operated a coal mine in the town of Black Diamond until the late 1950s. That town is a popular destination for cyclists these days.
More history
I'll probably be bicycling to some other coal-mining sites in Eastside in coming weeks. I'm trying reinvigorate my interest in some bicycle routes by exploring the historical sites that I pass.
Not that I'm any kind of historian, but I stumbled across this article in the Guardian Unlimited about the author of “The Discovery of France” who had done a lot of his research while on bicycling holidays in France.
“Therein lies the irony of being a cyclist historian of the 21st century: in its early days, the bicycle was all about speeding things up, about making distances seem smaller, and communities closer. Now, in the era of transnational autoroutes, its great virtue is slowing things down, enabling the researcher to note the particularity of people and places…”
I've always thought the best way to learn about a place is by bicycle.
Stats
While keeping my eyes open for historical landmarks along the way, I'm continuing my goal to pedal 4,000 miles in 2008. So far I've racked up 1,218 miles this year and 289 miles in the month of April, a little off-pace. I've been out on the bike 67 times.
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