Roslyn

The explosion at Roslyn No. 1 mine at 1:45 in the afternoon on May 10, 1892, was the worst coal disaster in Washington history — forty-five miners killed when firedamp detonated twenty-seven hundred feet below the town. The mine's ventilation airway stopped at the fourth level; the miners were in the process of extending it when the gas went up. Recovery crews pulled fourteen bodies the first day; some miners refused to go back down at all.

Roslyn was a railroad company town — platted by the Northern Pacific Coal Company in 1886 to feed locomotives crossing the Cascades — and it drew the whole world to the coal face: Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Scots, Irish, Germans. The cemetery on the hill above town is the record: twenty-six separate ethnic and lodge cemeteries side by side, each fraternal order and nationality keeping its own dead in its own section — the largest and most diverse cemetery complex in the Northwest.

The 1888 strike made Roslyn a landmark in labor history — when the Knights of Labor walked out for the eight-hour day, the company recruited Black miners from the Midwest as strikebreakers, and the town that resulted became one of the largest African American communities in the pre-Great Migration Northwest. The two groups eventually organized together; Roslyn's Black burial section is part of the same hillside cemetery.

The town outlived the mines — the last one closed in 1963 — and became famous again in the nineties as the filming location for Northern Exposure, the Brick Tavern standing in for itself. But the real Roslyn is on the hill: twenty-six cemeteries keeping the ledger of every nation the coal company called in, including the forty-five who never came up on May 10.