Originally published in the Black Diamond Bulletin, Fall 2011
By Ken Jensen
Take a drive from Black Diamond, up Lawson Hill and past Lake 12, past Franklin and over the one-lane bridge, past the Green River Gorge Resort and up toward the foothills to the southeast….
At last you arrive at the corner of SE 352nd Street and the Veazie-Cumberland Road. An old rusted Pepsi sign marks the spot that—if it were in better condition—would sure to be coveted by those guys from American Pickers.
Welcome to Cumberland.
Named in 1893 by F.X. Schriner after Pennsylvania’s coal-rich Cumberland Valley, this coal mining and logging town—like parts of Black Diamond and Ravensdale—looks much as it did a century ago. Just 7 miles separate Cumberland and Black Diamond and yet its history is quite different.
For starters, unlike Black Diamond, Ravensdale, or even Selleck, Cumberland was not a company town dominated by one primary employer.
“There were dozens of mines here at one time,” Frank Tost, a long-time resident of Cumberland, told the Enumclaw Courier-Herald in 1985. “They included the Hyde Mine and Bayne Carbon Fuel Company, and smaller ones like Occidental, Eureka, and Sunset.”
And also unlike Black Diamond, the railroad came here first, then they started mining coal.
In fact, the Northern Pacific literally carved the town out of the wilderness around 1886-1887. Then came the homesteaders. And then came the coal miners. The Milwaukee Road joined the din of activity in town around 1910, building its logging spur from Kerriston Junction to Enumclaw.
At its peak in 1919, Cumberland had around 800 residents and 100 students at its elementary school. Following the 1921 miners’ strike and the declining coal market following World War I, there were only 150 hardy folks who still called Cumberland home by 1931.
The post office, which opened October 13, 1894, finally closed for good February 9, 1967.
One of the early homesteaders in these parts was Fred Nolte, the “founding father” of Cumberland. Nolte, who had settled on 160 acres around Deep Lake in the early 1880s—now known as Nolte State Park—also homesteaded the area that includes the current town in the late 1880s.
It was Nolte who built the Cumberland Hotel in 1893, still going strong today as the City Hall Saloon & Eatery. It was one of several “hotels” built to house miners, but the stalwart structure also did double-duty as the town’s first post office and store—that is, until Joe and Elizabeth Paschich opened the Cumberland Grocery in 1916.
Behind the hotel was the railroad depot, which was served by a daily passenger train. After the hotel was converted into a saloon, the owners continued to rent the rooms upstairs. And rumor has it that a “house of ill repute” operated up there.
While photographer Bob Dobson, BDHS directors Dan Hutson and Don Mason, and I were doing some “research” at the saloon—just chatting with patrons, mind you—several old-timers confirmed that the rumor was … well, still just a good rumor!
Nolte was also an investor and operator of several coal mines. “Ol’ man Nolte, he opened up some of them coal veins up around Cumberland. He made money that way,” recalled Ernie Seliger.
And Seliger—the unofficial “mayor” of Cumberland, who passed away last summer—would have known. He spent all 95 of his years in Cumberland. A coal miner, a logger, and the owner of his own mill, what Seliger didn’t know about Cumberland first-hand he learned from his father, Arthur Seliger, who was born in nearby Veazie in 1889.
Arthur’s father came to Veazie with the railroad and homesteaded there, carving out an existence in an area where the trees were so big it was difficult to clear the land.
“They’d build a fire—them great big trees—they didn’t have saws to cut ‘em down. So they’d build a fire at the base of the tree until it burnt off and fell over,” said Seliger in a taped interview with Don Mason. “Then they’d take axes and chop all the limbs off and place the limbs up against the tree and start the fire and burn that whole tree up.”
Selinger was born just after the town was platted in 1910 by the Fleet Coal Company, which operated a mine on the Eureka seam. Its officers, B. Fallows and G.W. Weatherly, president and secretary, respectively, signed the plat.
Among the street names were School Street, Fleet Street, and the ubiquitous Railroad Avenue. In fact, the Veazie-Cumberland Road through Cumberland was originally Weatherly Avenue, while 312th Way SE was Fallows Avenue.
The Fleet Coal Company never amounted to much, but its plat did leave a legacy that survives today even if the names of the roads didn’t.
And that’s true of much of what has transpired in Cumberland’s long history.
Coal mining was more or less over by the 1950s, but the telltale signs are still there—it just takes some looking.
Members of the society managed to find both openings of the Navy Mine, now sealed, to the south of Cumberland this spring. To the west are the huge foundation ruins of the Hyde Mine, hidden under a thick canopy of trees and by the passage of time.
And some of Cumberland’s history is hiding in plain sight: The Cumberland School Gymnasium, now owned by the King County Fire District, is a good example.
That’s what I find so fascinating about Cumberland’s history—and that of parts of Black Diamond, Selleck, and Ravensdale, too: It’s still there to see.
What is the source for these photos? I’d like to view the collection.
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The photos (with the exception of the 1895 Navy Mine, which belongs to BDHS) were from the King County property record archives in Bellevue or we shot them as we were walking around town.
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