Newcastle coal country

In 1863 Edwin Richardson was surveying near Cougar Mountain when he found coal in the area that became known as Coal Creek [1]. The claims filed there took the name Newcastle, after the coal city in England [1]. By 1870 the Seattle Coal Company had taken over the Lake Washington Coal Company, and some of its owners formed the Seattle Coal & Transportation Company to move the coal rather than leave it in the ground [1]. The route they built was a hard one: tramway to the Lake Washington shore, scows towed across by tugboats, another tram over the Montlake Portage, barges down Lake Union, and finally Seattle's first railroad, which began running on March 22, 1872 and carried the coal over Denny Hill to bunkers at Pike Street [1]. Moving the cars between all those modes meant handling them 11 times, and the route lasted until 1878 [1]. In that decade, 790,629 tons left Seattle's wharves [1].