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What do you do whether you concede an 8,000-acre coal mine?
You start selling construction and landscaping products, such as sand, gravel and beautiful trait bark.
That is what the owners of Palmer Coking Coal did to bar in business. This year the Black Diamond-based crew, about 25 miles southeast of Seattle, celebrates its 75th anniversary.
“It’session also with respect to listening to your customers. They are the best to tell you what your company has to do,” says William Kombol, superintendent and interest holder of Palmer Coking.
The reinvention took decades. Kombol has neatly documented that change in files stacked on office shelves.
He traces his lineage to the Morris family, Welsh immigrants who moved to the area in the 1880s and entered the coal business.
In the late 19th century, coal was the second-biggest industry in the region after lumbering. Black Diamond lies in the Green River Coal Field, one of the two big coal areas in King County. The other is the mines around Newcastle, just south of Bellevue.
“Walk through the woods there, and you can still find the remains of that industry, like concrete foundations or railroad grades,” Kombol says.
By 1912, brace Morris brothers, Abe and Jonas, founded the kindred’s earliest coal-mining company, South Willis Coal, together with their brother-in-law Frank Merritt near Wilkeson in Pierce County.
Coal production peaked in Washington state during World War I. But by the time the Morris family founded Palmer Coking in 1933, the industry was in decline.
“Basically, this gang always had to fight not more than a shrinking market,” Kombol says.
At its peak in the 1950s, Palmer had 120 employees. Today it has 20.
The household knew how to cope with the herculean market, starting with the company’session race.
Clever branding
“Nothing special about ‘Palmer,’ which was then a well-known railway crossing,” Kombol says. But “Coking Coal” was a trick, for it is a high-quality coal not commonly found in this area.
“It just on condition the company with a certain marketing edge; people in the business knew it,” Kombol says.
Robert Ficken, a local historian, traces the atrophy of the industry to labor strikes in the 1890s, a subside quality of coal compared with deposits in California, and the replacement of the coal-driven trains by the agency of diesel locomotives.
Also, as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’session New Deal, huge hydroelectric dams such as the Grand Coulee Dam on the Columbia River were built, providing the region with cheap energy.
“By the 1950s, the number of our competitors had shrunk from with reference to 20 in the 1930s to respecting five in the King County domain,” Kombol says.
In 1975, Palmer closed its mine near Ravensdale — the last underground coal mine in the state.
But the company continued surface mining to the time when 1986 when it shut down the McKay-Section-12-Mine in Black Diamond and started reclamation drudge there.
In 2006, large-scale coal mining in the pass pretty much ended when the TransAlta mine near Centralia closed and put about 550 people out of work.
Few left
The number of coal miners in Washington has dropped to about 50, according to figures compiled by the case Employment Security Department.
Between 1933 and 1986 Palmer sold an estimated 2.5 million tons of coal.
“In the early days, the lives of the miners and their families were eagerly influenced by the coal companies, because towns like Black Diamond or Newcastle were often quickly constructed and only for the purpose of housing the workers and their families,” Ficken says.
“There were shops that belonged to the company, canaille spent their free time with their families, who were oftentimes large, and there was a lot of vegetable increasing.”
A modest life, no doubt. “But the wages were good, I judge at random, at in the smallest degree compared to working in the logging business or in a sawmill, what one. were the only other major be in action opportunities round,” says George Costanich, who comes from a family of coal miners and worked for Palmer from 1949 to 1955.
Today, the 85-year-old lives in Auburn, Calif.
“It was hard natural drudge,” Costanich recalls. The miners drilled holes into the coal, entice in explosives, ignited them and shoveled the coal into cars to be carried in the place of the surface.
Dangerous work, sometimes, especially in the premature days. But even later, cave-ins still occurred.
Palmer had its worst accident in 1955 when four miners died.
“As a miner, you just didn’t think about the risk. We learned to live through it,” says Costanich, who survived two smaller cave-ins. “I have great respect for people in operation underground, no matter if coal or gold miners.”
New ventures
With the end of coal in sight, Palmer started to experiment with new duty opportunities in the 1970s.
“It was really trial and error. Our business imitation has always been based on the land,” says Kombol, who has been frugal the company since 1981.
Today, the firm offers about 30 different products, among them six different topsoils and 20 types of washed, crushed and screened gravel.
Palmer also harvests 20 to 40 acres of timber per year.
“But this is just a scanty part of our walk of life considering the market is very beset with difficulty. The prices are down appropriate to weighty competition from Russia, New Zealand or Indonesia,” Kombol says.
“Also, planting new trees is a allot of work, and the whole cycle of wounding and growing is a slow one that takes about 40 years.”
In new years, Palmer has been profiting from the region’s booming real estate. “But lately business has been worse,” says Kombol.
The privately held company does not communicate its financials. But Kombol estimates that his sales during the first half of this year were in a descending course 30 percent compared with the first six months of 2007.
Palmer any one delivers the rocks and spot, or customers can pick it up. “That’s also when people often ask because of special products, probably lava rocks or boulders of a certain size,” Kombol says.
In etc. to those items, Palmer sells different types of cinder, including their “Safeco Field warning track cinders” used by the Seattle Mariners and Little League and high-school baseball fields in the area.
Although Palmer has changed its business model, Kombol has not given up in continuance coal as a vocation opportunity.
“In Great Britain they are experimenting with ardent coal underground, by that means extracting the energy without mining the resource. With technical progress and resurrection oil prices, that might be profitable someday,” he says.
“Hey, coal has been big once, why shouldn’t it come hindmost?” Kombol asks.
But mostly he concentrates on change.
“Because that’s what has kept our company around for 75 years.”
Seattle Times news researcher David Turim and desk editor Bill Kossen contributed to this report.
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