Originally published in the Globe News, August 17, 1975
By Bill Smull
The railroad created the mines, just as surely as it created the roadbed and the shiny metal rails that carried millions of tons of coal away from the forested Cascade valleys.
The coal companies, in turn, created Cumberland, naming it after the rich Pennsylvania mining area and peopling it with thousands of immigrants who found their “promised land” in the black veins lacing those rounded, ancient hills.
The town existed as early as 1893, but the faded copy of a blue cloth plat owned by Ernie Seliger is dated Sept. 21, 1910. B. Fallows and G.W. Weatherly, president and secretary of Fleet Coal Co., signed the plat; one of the streets bore—and still bears—Weatherly’s name.
Other streets and avenues constitute the coal company’s legacy: Railroad, Fleet, and Carbon all refer to important elements in the economic mix which powered Cumberland’s turn-of-the-century boom. Carbon, according to Seliger, is the name of the richest coal vein in the vicinity.
At one time or another, there were literally dozens of mines practically within walking distance of the community—the Hyde, Navy, Bayne, Occidental, Sunset, and several others. Some were well-financed, large-scale operations; others were tiny “gyppo” mines, operated by a hopeful family or two struggling to scratch a living from a vein overlooked or left behind by others.
Even in the early 1920s the decline of Cumberland’s fortunes had begun. “Mining was already on its way out when we came in 1923,” said Frank Potocnik, son of a Slovenian miner who moved to the town from Black Diamond. Potocnik forsook the mines for a logging career, but there are still a few men in town who worked the shafts and can recall the potential and problems of each mine.
“The Hyde mine was closed about 1914 by a miner’s strike,” Seliger said. “They let it fill up with water. About 1939, Sam Hyde tried to open up the old tunnel from the Green River into the mountain to drain the water, but the shaft just kept collapsing—the hydraulic pressure was too great.
“Dad and I opened up another part of the Hyde mine. That was part of the McKay vein—highest-grade coal in the area.”
The pressure of the ground water was well-known to local miners, according to Mrs. Elizabeth Parkerson, 74. “The Hyde mine ran right underneath Fish Lake,” she said. “If it broke through there would have been no earthly way of saving anyone’s life.”
She recalled how her husband, William, once drilled and blasted 100 tons of coal in a single day. “He was a good miner,” she said with pride. “Wherever he worked, everybody liked him.” But none of William Parkerson’s five sons followed in his footsteps, and Parkerson himself died of black lung in 1969.
Mrs. Parkerson survives on Social Security, a federal payment for survivors of black lung victims, and the bounty of a huge backyard garden. It’s not unlike the lean years of the depression, which bore down heavily on Cumberland residents, according to Mrs. Parkerson.
“It was terrible, living here,” she said. “There was no work to be gotten. We had our own livestock and made our own cheese and butter. The kids—there were eight of them—picked berries, and sometimes they made more money than my husband and a friend could make cutting wood.
“I don’t know how some people would make it today, the way they waste things,” she said as she stuffed green apples from her fruit-laden trees into a sack.
But her thoughts took a more philosophic turn when she paused on her back steps to consider the changes in the town. “People and times change,” she reflected. “You’ve got to live with it. I don’t find no fault with them.”
Next door to Mrs. Parkerson, former miner John Manson thought back over nearly six decades of life in Cumberland. “There used to be 500 to a thousand men in the mines,” he said. “There were quite a few more people then.”
“Now there are about 200 registered voters,” said his wife, Ethel. “That’s for the area from Veazie to Kanaskat.”
When the miners and loggers were around in force, the town was livelier, Manson said. “During the dry days, when there were no card rooms, they’d take a blanket across the Northern Pacific tracks over there and lay it on the ground,” Manson said. “I saw $1,000 to $1,500 lying on that blanket.”
The last mine closed in the early 1950s according to Potocnik. Logging now is the predominant industry, although some residents of the area commute to jobs in “the city.”
A tavern, grocery store, café, and gas station make up the “business district,” scene of a spectacular murder which lingers in many old-timers’ memories.
Joe Pasich, the town’s first postmaster and owner of the grocery store which still operates on the town’s main street, was shot as he walked outside to investigate the source of a rock which had crashed through a window.
Ernie Seliger says he heard those shots.
“I was staying with my grandmother in her boarding house up on Miller’s Hill, ” he said. “We had heard a car engine idling before the shots, and then the car drove off toward Enumclaw.”
Police at Enumclaw, notified by Pasich’s wife after the postmaster staggered through his back door and fell dead, mistakenly thought she had told them Pasich had shot somebody, Seliger said. The deputies met a speeding car while enroute to Cumberland but didn’t know until too late that it probably contained the murderer.
“Some said it was a guy who got drafted,” Seliger said. “Pasich was on the draft board, and rumor had it there were several who said they would come back and kill him. A bootlegger from Seattle told me years later that an inmate at Walla Walla confessed to the murder just before he died, but as far as I know, the case is still open.”
Cumberland’s “case” also is still open. Although the town remains tiny, the countryside is sprouting more and more new houses as commuting city workers continue to flee suburbia. And the energy locked in those huge seams of coal may be the key to a future revitalization. Cumberland nearly died when the railroads stopped buying coal and the Navy started fueling its battleships with oil.
Veazie, Krain, Fleet, Bayne, Franklin, and dozens of other little communities disappeared with scarcely a trace—but it could all come back, if the right people begin believing there could be a profit in opening the old mines.
If and when they do, they will answer the question voiced by Mrs. Parkerson as she fixed her gaze on the site of the old Navy mine: “There’s a lot of coal still in these hills, but who’s going to mine it?”
Simple pleasure from Cumberland
Pleasures tend to be simple among those who have spent their lives in small towns such as Cumberland.
One example is the recipe for coal crystals recalled by Edith Gleason, who has run a small, comfortable café on the main street for 30 years.
It hasn’t been long since Mrs. Gleason kept cedar boards next to the front door for the benefit of loggers wearing Caulke (pronounced “cork”) boots. Clomping around with the boards stuck to their spiked soles, the loggers couldn’t tear up the wood floor.
In a town like that, youngsters could—and still can—be entertained by the natural phenomenon produced by rock salt, water, blueing, and a lump of coal.
“You just put the lump of coal in a dish and cover it with brine and some laundry blueing,” she said. “It grows white crystals tinged with blue.”
Just a simple thing which has entertained generations of coal town youngsters. A simple thing which might even appeal to some more sophisticated city folks.
If they don’t mind driving out to Cumberland to find some coal.
In many ways the loggers, their drink, their ways are unchanged
Loggers and miners have filled its barroom with tobacco smoke, off-color stories and well-stretched yarns for more years than anyone can clearly remember.
Fancy plaster adorns the ceiling and synthetic tiles cover the honest wood floor—but the forthright speech and earthy sentiments of the patrons of Cumberland’s only tavern reverberate within its aged walls the same as they did at the turn of the century.
Any given afternoon or evening, Dick Weiks—himself a former logger—will be setting up a few cold ones for a convivial gathering of ruddy outdoorsmen. Visitors are welcome, though flatlanders had best come prepared to be befuddled by such logging terms as “cold decks” and “schoolmarms.” But even if a stranger doesnt know the difference between a pile of logs and a forked tree, the atmosphere is warm.
Old-timers recall the tavern once was a hotel, with rooms upstairs, a post office, and a store. “It was operated by Fred Nolte in the 1890s,” said Frank Potocnik, who lives next door. Potocnik himself is the son of an early merchant—his father and mother operated the grocery store in the 1920s and 1930s.
Although prohibition put a damper on the tavern business, conviviality continued to flourish, according to Potocnik. “There always was a little bootlegging going on during prohibition days, and a raid now and then,” he said. “There was a pool hall where our house sits now that was a gathering place for some of the men, and there was a little booze sold illegally—but that was before I was buying it,” he hastened to add.
But beer flows legally and freely now. The establishment, once known as “Big Mike’s,” is now called “Carolyn’s.” The upstairs rooms are used for storage. The younger woodsmen are as likely to be talking about racing cars as logging, Few old-timers appear to comment on the old logging pictures which adorn the tavern walls.
But one gets the impression that these are the same kind of people—with much the same approach to work and play—as the miners and loggers who tore Cumberland out of the wilderness nearly a century ago.
And if you get to know the people, it somehow doesn’t make any difference whether the floor is covered by tile or sawdust.
I used to live in Cumberland from 1945-1953 my Dads relatives owed the Hyde Mine, My dad worked in the mine for a few years then he logged for a few. As a kid I used to fish in Hyde lake, also deep lake. I went school at the Cumberland grade school which is now a fire house. We used to go to Big Mikes tavern and look for money he used to sweep it out on the back steps. The town has changed since I was a kid but after so many years things look different. If anyone reads this my name is Jack please email me @ dorlyonhj50 @Hotmail.com……………. Good old days
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My grandparents Sue and Robert (Bob) Eager bought Carolyns made it the Eager Beaver tavern now my uncle owns it now the city hall saloon.
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I was raised in Cumberland and my Great Grand Father built the Tavern and ran it for years.
Ken Miller
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