WRITTEN BY PAUL DORPAT

COURTESY OF DAN KERLEE

Facing Ravensdale Road, many of the company houses evident in the scene from the early 20th century now hide behind the screen of trees that has long since filled the strip between them and the tracks that were, in the beginning, Ravensdale's lifeline.

COURTESY OF JEAN SHERRARD

RAVENSDALE WAS BUILT only as big as it needed to be. Like many other towns in the foothills of south-central King County, Ravensdale was sited for reasons that had little to do with town planning. It sat beside a Northern Pacific Railroad track and coal — and a railroad subsidiary, the Northwest Improvement Co., handled the payroll for this company town.

When the town's first postmaster, William C. Jones, first applied the Ravensdale stamp to its correspondence on Dec. 21, 1901, it was also a sign of the town's stability.

Leaning heavily on the accounts of historylink.org's historian, Alan Stein, and Bill Kombol, manager of the Palmer Coking Co., I put together these few touchstones of Ravensdale history:

In 1903, working six 10-hour days a week, the miners at Ravensdale formed a union. By 1910 (the approximate date for the historical view), they had won the eight-hour day. That year the federal census counted 816 residents, and of the 280 men working for the company, 250 were in the tunnels. In 1915, an explosion in the lowest (1,500-foot) level killed 31 of them; 23 had families. Ravensdale never recovered, and was disincorporated in the 1920s. The records are lost, and the town cemetery — including the graves of many of the blast victims — is overgrown and vandalized.

In the 1950s, Enoch Rogers, a bulldozer operator for the Palmer company, uncovered at Ravensdale a vertical coal seam roughly 16 feet wide and 750 feet deep. When Palmer closed the entrance to the seam with dynamite in 1975 it was a historic blast. The Rogers Mine No. 3 was the state's last underground coal mine.