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The Lochdam Vanguard Coal Mine — the pit the whole town was built to serve — lies sealed in the mountains of the Balder Wilds, south of Lochdam. The coal drawn from these tunnels made the town, and in the end, helped to unmake it.
The Balder Coal Company opened the mine in 1883 and drew some hundred miners to the Blue Rock valley — many of them experienced hands brought up from the Pennsylvania coalfields. By 1890 the mine was giving fifty thousand tons a year: a clean-burning anthracite of high quality, prized by the railroads and the steelworks. The town grew up around the pit, and for two generations a job at the coal or the dam was the thing young men dreamed of.
In 1936, in the lean years of the Depression, one of the galleries gave way and crushed nineteen men beneath the rock. Their bodies were never recovered. The company simply walled the tunnel shut and raised a memorial stone with the nineteen names cut into it — and the work went on.
From its earliest days a small creek of waste had run down from the workings and into the lake, and over the decades it turned the water sick (see The Mirror). Swimmers came home with rashes, and old miners coughed a cough that would not clear; some blamed the factory smoke, some the mine dust, but most said nothing at all. Then, on 9 February 1970, an unannounced federal inspection under the new Coal Mine Health and Safety Act found a ventilation system that had not worked properly in years and tunnels that did not hold. And so the mine — one of the oldest and largest in the Pacific Northwest — was closed. Three thousand people lost their work in a single day, and the town began its long fall.
In the years since, Lochdam has all but forgotten the pit that made it. But the oldest in town have not: they know it still lies in the Balder Wilds, behind its warning signs, still holding nineteen names in its walls.
Lochdam Town · The Mirror · Camber House