This sign greets visitors for their grand historical tour of Roslyn's boom town past
In a lot of ways it’s a classic western mining town, that has kept a certain personality of its own, that few other historic towns in Washington possess.
Drive down Pennsylvania Avenue and the boom town of yesteryear, Roslyn, stands before you. Original false-fronted stores line the once busy avenue, complete with fading wood and decor from the past.
Roslyn, was the filming location for the fictional town of Cicely, Alaska in the hit television series "Northern Exposure"
In 1886 two prospectors looking for gold, Nez Jensen, and a traveling blacksmith named George Virden, found a mountain of coal southwest of Cl Elum Lake. At that time there was a tremendous demand for coal because the time for railroad building had begun, and the railroads were looking for large quantities of it. A partnership soon took over the vast holdings of Jensen and Virden, and by the end of the year the Roslyn coal mines were in production.
Nez "Cayuse" Jensen built the first log cabin that still stands on Second and Utah. He filed a 160acre claim that is much of Roslyn today
Soon a mining town began to take shape. It was a rough camp in those years, inhabited by hundreds of hard-core coal miners who played as hard as they worked. Before long the camp became a boom town, and what a boom town it was. Saloons had control of the business section of town and most of them were doing booming business.
These buildings are over one-hundred years old, and were occupied by saloons, billard halls, a barber shop and wash houses. After the miners had finished cleaning up, they could then go to the brothels on the upper floors
By 1901 the population had reached the 3,500 mark, production of the mines passed 1,000,000 tons for the first time and the town was booming. Then in the 1920s the demand for coal began to taper off and by the late 1920s Roslyn was beginning to fade.
Today when you visit Roslyn, the boom town days of yesteryear are never far from your thoughts.
