Black Diamond, King County, Washington, 98010
Black Diamond was King County’s fastest growing small city. Black Diamond was a rural coal mining area founded in the 1880s by the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company of California, which owned and operated the mine. The first residents were mostly former employees of the company’s prior coal mining operation at Nortonville, California, which mostly sold coal to the growing new metropolis of San Francisco. By the early 1900s, the town had a population of roughly 3,500 people, many of whom were European immigrants; the majority of the working males were involved in coal production. The Pacific Coast Coal train carried this coal to Seattle.
