Steve Williams stands near the entrance of the Red Town Cougar Mountain trailhead. To the untrained eye, many of the artifacts he points out look like part of the landscape: A chunk of concrete foundation overgrown with moss, the inky black of discarded coal and the crumbled entrance to a mine.

They’re all remnants of a ghost town.

“See that pile of bricks. It’s the foundation for the generator house,” Williams said, gesturing toward a mass of concrete, covered in thick blackberry brambles. “They had a steam plant down here…ran generators, and that supplied electricity for the whole town.”

The Eastside’s history of coal mining dates back to the early 1860s, when discoveries in Issaquah, Renton and Coal Creek spurred a century-long industry that would dramatically change the physical and social landscape of the region. Coal, traveling on tramways and later railroads toward San Francisco, would help develop Seattle as a port city, and sprout a web of infrastructure along the coal seams.

“Most folks have no idea,” says Williams. “Nor did I, and I grew up and went to school here. When I was a kid at the University of Washington, there was a huge pile of coal [in the center of campus]…But I had no idea [that coal] was coming from across the way.”

Today, the city of Newcastle and the area of south Bellevue are interlaced with highways and pocketed with 21st century artifacts: a golf course, mall shopping and suburbia.

But while a growing skyline captures everyone’s attention, local historians like Williams, who leads tours of Coal Creek and hosts lectures through the Eastside Heritage Center, hope they can bring a small piece of that history back to life for residents.

“It’s so important to educate people about coal mining history,” says Pam Lee, a member of the Newcastle Historical Society. “It makes a real source of pride to have something so unique and important to this area’s beginning.”

A living museum

Milt Swanson, who this month celebrated his 95th birthday, calls himself the last living artifact of the Eastside’s coal mining days. His small, boxy house near one entrance to Cougar Mountain, is the same building he grew up in, one of only two remaining houses constructed for workers by a coal company.

Outside is a single-room museum circled by rows upon rows of heirlooms Swanson has picked through himself: the school desk he and his mother sat in, lanterns used to descend into the dark mining caves, yellowing photographs and segments of the railway that once transported coal.

“We used to work eight hours, from daylight to daylight,” recalls Swanson, sitting on his living room couch. Across from him, propped against a piano is a time-worn map of the old mining camps of Red Town, atop which his house is located. “When we got out [of the mines] it was dark again.”

Swanson worked alongside his father and cousin, as a machinist for B&R Coal, one of several companies that operated out of the region. Like many of the workers, his relatives were migrants from Sweden. Labor camps were a diverse crowd, comprised of Finnish, Italians, French, English, and later included Native Americans, African Americans and Chinese as the industry called for lower wages. At least 14 different ethnicities populated the camps at one point. At its’ peak in 1917, the Newcastle mines produced over 360,000 tons of coal in a single year. But by the end of the Great Depression, without a war to drive demand and the arrival of cheaper fuel products onto the market, most big coal companies had pulled out.

“I like to tell people, think of Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War as being the start of the coal mining days,” explains Williams, “and the Space Needle in 1963 as being the end of it.”

Coal towns were microcosms of life. Red Town, where Swanson still lives, featured a hotel, post office and more than 1,000 people at its peak. Children attended the company school, and on weekends rivaling companies played each other in soccer and baseball. When work was tight or the weather didn’t permit, men toggled between jobs, sometimes leaving the mines for the logging industry.

“There were people who…were for half a day in the mine,” remembers Swanson. “Soon as they got out, they wanted to quit.”

At one point the mines of the Eastside stretched from Renton to Bellevue and east to North Bend, though the excavated coal was different from anywhere else in the U.S. and Europe. Workers were forever at odds with the wet climate. Groundwater often had to be pumped out of the mines and even the best product was softer than most.

Still, folks like Swanson and Williams maintain that the industry made the Eastside what it is today. Many of the area’s hills are actually coal tailings; the land is honeycombed with empty mine shafts; and one reason the course at Newcastle Golf Club isn’t developed as housing is because it sits atop a bulldozed strip mine.

How the Eastside preserves that history remains to be seen. Seven new interpretative signs are expected for Coal Creek Park, spotlighting for instance the concrete foundation of an old steam generating plant. Newcastle Cemetery, once maintained by Swanson, has also been labeled a preservation project. As for his museum, the city of Newcastle has discussed finding a more formal space for Swanson’s artifacts. No plans have been made.

“These are remnants of old Newcastle,” says Williams. “But modern development is coming in real fast.”

When the mines closed in 1962, Swanson left for a job at Boeing. Businesses pulled out, and most workers abandoned their company homes. Swanson said he never thought of leaving.

“I’m happy here,” he says, glancing around the room. For a moment, he seems lost in his memories.

“For 91 years, I’ve lived in this house.”