Fairfax was a town in the east Pierce County coal mining district, located about five miles south of Carbonado.
Fairfax’s discovery came as a result of William E. Williams and his father unearthing a coal seam in 1892. The Western American Company began work on this coal prospect in 1896. It was in a remote area of the Cascades, with rolling hills about 1,330 feet above sea level.
Separating Carbonado and Fairfax stood one of the thickest stands of Douglas fir in all of Washington State. Between the two towns also lay a three-mile long canyon where the Carbon River surged and pounded through a chasm of solid rock.
This canyon made river travel impossible and coal mining would not have happened without construction of a rail link by the Northern Pacific Railroad. The coals of Fairfax were well suited to the production of coke, so 60 coke ovens were soon constructed.
However, the mine was located on the other side of the Carbon River, so a 1.5 mile long flume was constructed to transport coal to the plant. Water pressure forced the coal along a wooden trough at a rapid rate. The flume was eight feet wide, four feet deep, with a two-foot walkway along the side.
At the plant, the coal was de-watered then sent to the ovens for conversion into coke, a by-product used in metallurgical industries.
When this photo was taken, the town was owned by the Tacoma Smelting Company, a Guggenheim-controlled company, with local operations overseen by W.R. Rust.
This 1909 photo comes courtesy of Stuart Marchalewicz Miller, a Seattle researcher of Polish descent.
