Franklin Ghost Town 6-24-05

Discovery of the McKay coal seam in July 1880 led to the creation of the town of Franklin in 1887. Located across the river from the present Green River Gorge Resort, it didn't take long to attract miners and their families.

In its glory days, which lasted until the 1920s, more than 1,100 people lived there on the hill above the gorge.

Today only a few moss- covered concrete foundations poke through the thick underbrush. Don Mason of Kent, a history buff and president of the Black Diamond Historical Society, continues to keep it alive with tours and old photographs.

The entrance to the townsite is off the Cum-berland-Franklin Road through a locked gate. The state has an easement across the flat area there, simply known as the Flats. Here the Knights of Pythius Hall built a community center. Baseball teams from rival mining towns played for bragging rights.

There was a hotel, a school and two saloons. One- and two-story wood frame homes clung to the hillside. A railroad line was built to Seattle.

Mine shafts burrowed into the hillside following the rivers of coal, dropping thousands of feet. They ran under the gorge and poked into its flanks near the water's edge.

Today most of the shafts are blocked and filled with ground water that flows back into the gorge.

On June 28, 1891, the gorge echoed with the sounds of a gun battle between African American miners brought in as strikebreakers and the striking Franklin miners. One man was killed.

Disaster struck in 1894, as 37 miners died in a smoky fire, the worst mine disaster in Western Washington history. In 1913, a fire destroyed a residential area known as Dogtown.

That year the Franklin mines were closed; they reopened the next year as World War I increased demand for coal. But by 1920, Franklin began disappearing into history.

In the 1970s, the Franklin site once again drew crowds, this time for weekend motorcycle hill climb competitions.

Besides coal, clay and cinnabar for mercury were mined from the gorge. Streaks of the distinctive cinnamon-colored cinnabar can be seen in the sandstone rocks.

Today, at low water, abandoned coal cars can be seen in the deep pools, including one just down river from the Green River Gorge Bridge. Under the bridge itself, partially hidden by brush, is the remains of an old donkey engine, a small steam engine used as a locomotive.

Further down, the old rail bridge used to haul coal from a mine still spans the gorge. It now carries the City of Black Diamond's water supply from its watershed adjacent to the gorge.

A pile of rocks anywhere in the gorge usually marks an old mine entrance, now sealed. Thick cables rise out of the water. Heavy-duty key rings are sunk in solid rock.

Across from the old Franklin site, a coal mine deep below that caught fire many decades ago still burns. Water filters through the heated rock, warms to 80 degrees and seeps out of the hillside into a shallow man-made pool of rocks.

On August 24, 1894, 37 miners die fighting a fire in the Oregon Improvement Co. coal mine at Franklin. The following day, a coroner's jury rules that the fire was caused by "party or parties unknown" who "did willfully, knowingly and maliciously cause said fire with intent and purpose to do great injury and damage to the lives of the miners and property of the Oregon Improvement Company." The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported, "few can be found here who are not in hearty accord with it."

Mine officials would not comment on the matter, but the following exchange with a pit boss was noted:

"I have an idea who set the breast [the face being worked at the end of an excavation] on fire, but I won't say."

"Why?"

"Cause the man I suspect is dead. He was smothered in the level."

The fire itself might not have had a fatal effect except for the combination of two unrelated factors. A worker shut down a fan that supplied air to the different levels, and a gas tester, John K. Johns, searching for his miner son, opened a door from another area thinking it would drive the smoke out. This changed the air flow and trapped the miners between two walls of smoke, approximately 1300 feet below the surface. Johns was found with his son in his arms. Both were dead. The miners were apparently building a "stopping" or bulkhead to seal themselves off from the fire and smoke when they were overcome.