If a laborer wanted a good site in the mine or enough coal cars to earn a good day's wage, it never hurt to bring the boss a bottle of wine on a regular basis. The winters were harsh and the work both dangerous and spotty. There were bitter labor strikes and two major mine accidents, one killing 45 men. It was a raucous town in the late 1800s and through the first few decades of this century, at its peak producing more than 1 million tons of coal a year and supporting two dozen bars and six grocery stores. Amid the sprawling, hilly Roslyn cemetery are 24 separate sections for each group's dead. The groups were united by their dangerous work and struggles against the company, but they fiercely maintained their own identities. One of the photos in the museum shows 24 children, all of different ethnic groups. Rosyln's population swelled to more than 4,000. Immigrants flocked from two dozen countries, including Greece, Austria, Poland, Yugoslavia and Italy. The community was born in 1886 when Northern Pacific Railroad mining engineers discovered a deep seam of coal. Building where the company store once doled out 49-cent shoes. The memorial sits prominently at the entrance to downtown Roslyn and in front of the Northwestern Improvement Co. Norris 1898-1964 fire boss mine foreman.Īt least 95 men died in area mine accidents, and their names have been given a special place on the statue's pedestal. Loved ones and friends paid $50 apiece for the tiles and to have their personal memorials engraved on them. Affixed to the wall are the black-granite tiles, bearing the engraved names of miners and often their wives. The memorial consists of a 6-foot-3-inch bronze statue of a miner surrounded by a three-sided wall. His mother raised the kids, tended the house, farm animals and garden, and hand-washed the soot-stained clothes. "He would always manage to save a cookie or a slab of his pie from his lunch to give us." "I will always remember him walking toward the house after work and waving at the kids and yelling hello," says Alquist, 85. His father was injured in the mines and died when Alquist was 11 years old. The group wanted to honor not just hard labor, but the miner's lifestyle not just the laborer, but his family as well. Tony Alquist, coordinator of the project, said there is good reason the statue shows the miner leaving work rather than wielding a pickax. They wanted to make sure that coal mining - the very reason Roslyn came to exist - was marked by more than the mountainous slag piles that peek above the ponderosa pines or the memorabilia tucked away in the museum. The days when coal was king in the eastern slopes of the Cascades ended more than 30 years ago, and Roslyn is still savoring the resurrection provided by a far cleaner industry, when television's "Northern Exposure" took over the town for four years.īut a group of 80 current and former Rosyln residents, all now in their 70s and 80s, became concerned that the foundation of the community and nearby towns Ronald and Cle Elum eventually would be swallowed by time and tourism. as part of the community's annual Labor Day weekend celebration known as Wing Ding Days. "That was called getting snaked," Andler says.Ĭoal mining and its bittersweet memories will receive a far more prominent place on Roslyn's landscape this Sunday, when the town of 900 people unveils the Miners' Memorial, a statue and tile wall carrying more than 1,200 dedications to those who labored, died in the mines and lived the life. That meant he was so far in debt at the company store that he could forget getting paid. Mary Andler, the museum's curator, says her father came home from the mines on payday more than once with a slip of paper with a "S" on it. Of all the artifacts in this mountain town's cluttered little museum, the one locals seem most proud of is the coal miner's paycheck, framed and mounted on the wall, showing his bottom line after the company store deducted the credit he had amassed. ROSLYN - Two weeks' hard work and a 6-cent paycheck.
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