With Big Bertha in the news on a regular basis we got to thinking about boring machines in general. Or rather, interesting boring machines.  One in particular comes to mind, from the historic coal mining community of Roslyn, Washington:

From Roslyn local historian, Sue Litchfield:

Steep-pitched mines predominated the Roslyn-Cle Elum Coal Field, making it more expensive to extract coal than the relatively flat coal seams in the east and Midwest. In an effort to cut costs Tom Murphy the mine’s general manager designed and built the N.W.I. Company’s coal boring machine. The boring machine was able to drill crosscuts and air tunnels in a third of the time required by conventional means. “Murphy earned recognition from engineers throughout America and other countries for his genius in coping with the problems of steep-pitch mining in the Roslyn Cle Elum Field,” wrote Cle Elum’s Miner Echo. “A boring machine, first put on paper about 1940 and finally constructed in the Roslyn shops about 2 years ago, was one of his pet projects. Employed at the No. 3 Mine, the machine has eliminated the expensive upkeep of ordinary main airways by boring them 42 inches in diameter through the coal.

These photos of the Northwest Improvement Company’s coal boring machine, as well as other mining machinery and equipment photos were digitized by the Roslyn Public Library with grant assistance from the Washington State Library. They are part of the Washington Rural Heritage Collection and come from the family photo collection of a descendant of Frank Badda, who worked for decades in the Roslyn mines, working his way up to the position of Superintendent until the last mine was closed in 1963.

Oh and back to Big Bertha, she does have one thing that the Roslyn boring machine lacked… a Twitter page.

Formerly the library was shoehorned into a series of small rooms on the main floor of the Roslyn City Hall. A combination of civic fundraising and grant writing allowed the City of Roslyn to jack the historic building up and rebuild and renovate the space beneath the main floor.

The City Library now inhabits a spacious portion of that ground floor with the Roslyn City Council Chambers.  These quarters are only temporary as the City intends to move forward with remodeling the original main floor.  When the remodel is finished, the library will move back upstairs.  The downstairs will then become a series of meeting rooms and offices.

Hundreds of hours of local volunteer labor and thousands of dollars of community fundraising made the new furniture, technology and new materials which grace the remodeled Roslyn possible. Highlights of the space:

• Light pours into the space from the numerous windows.
• The wooden shelving salvaged from the downtown Seattle Nakumura Court House blends beautifully with the new furniture.

  

  The bench was a find that is very popular with folks who like to sit while selecting audio and large print books.

• A wide bench which has quickly become a favorite spot for customers to sit and peruse new adult materials was a local find on Craigslist. Handcrafted from old growth Douglas fir and put together with no nails, it’s even better because the craftsman is a library patron.
• The local art wall which coexists next to a salvaged jail door from the original City Jail. Picturing America, National Endowment for Humanities grant, was the genesis of Roslyn’s effort to highlight their local artists on a rotating basis.
• The jail door adds historical flavor with a story on the wall from a former inmate.  The inmate reports that he went out a convenient window to collect his shoes from home and was back in his jail cell without the jailer being any wiser.

Roslyn City library patrons are justly proud of their new library space.

To see more pictures of the Roslyn library, visit our Flickr page!

Every day, thousands of motorists make their way along Interstate-90 as it winds through Snoqualmie Pass before sloping gracefully to the Columbia Plateau. This often-traveled highway affords beautiful views of central Washington: from rugged, snow-capped mountain peaks to rolling, golden fields. Most cars fly past Roslyn, a tiny mountain town a few miles north of Cle Elum, without realizing that it is home to a fascinating, one-of-a-kind cemetery; the state’s oldest continually operated bar; and was the setting of a popular 1990s television show. Most notoriously, however, it boasts some of the state’s richest mining history.

Roslyn was settled in the late nineteenth century by miners and their families, recruited by the Northwest Improvement Company to tunnel underground and exhume the deposits of coal that would be tapped for more than half a century. These founding families hailed from dozens of countries, and together they forged a home and a community. Though mining activities have gradually halted, this rich blend of languages, cultures and traditions is still evident in today’s citizens.

Washington Rural Heritage worked with Erin Krake, Roslyn’s librarian, to digitize and preserve a fading set of Ektachrome slides showing many facets of early Roslyn life. She tapped several townspeople to lend vivid descriptions of these images, telling the story behind the story. Many of these volunteer catalogers, sons and daughters of miners, recall hearing firsthand accounts of the events in the photographs.

Our favorites include a chilling portrait of women widowed by the 1892 mine explosion; a snapshot of a young couple giving a backyard concert; and a 22-ton chunk of coal, destined for greatness at the Chicago World Fair in 1893.

We’ve also included a lecture series by local historian David H.A. Browitt, who gives explicitly detailed accounts of the role that mining played in the town’s development. You’ll hear, for example, about mining methodology; the corporate decisions that brought in African-American strikebreakers; and the events leading up to and surrounding the mine explosions that rocked this sleepy community.

View the collection online at: http://www.washingtonruralheritage.org/roslyn/