Knowledge is most easily preserved in written words. Oral histories can last generations, but they lack the permanence of scripted accounts, which survive the ages. While the legendary Library of Alexandria preserved the wisdom of the ancient world, it was Gutenberg’s printing press that eventually made books accessible to everyday people.
This legacy of free, shared knowledge traveled widely and even found homes in coal mining towns. Black Diamond’s first-known library was fittingly housed in the Pacific Coast Coal Hotel, located at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Baker Street on the Fraternal Order of the Eagles’ parking lot.
After a 1914 fire in the downtown district consumed two hotels, a meat market, and a bakery, PCC built a two-story hotel with 67 rooms, with three toilets, 13 plumbing fixtures, and a coal-fired steam boiler for heat. The hotel, built in 1916, housed single miners, as families typically rented company-provided homes. A small room was set aside as the library, and lending books were gathered by the Parent-Teacher Association with donations from townspeople. With so many single men in residence at the hotel, young women were not allowed to visit the library unless they went in pairs or with chaperones.
As coal mining declined in importance in the early 1920s, Pacific Coast began selling properties. In 1922, the library was relocated to the back room of the real estate office in the railroad depot, which now serves as the Black Diamond History Museum. As reported in the May 24, 1922, Pacific Coast Bulletin, the library was open four days a week and had just received 380 new books. Victoria Niemczyk was the librarian. It remained in the depot for 35 years, by which time trains had long abandoned the downtown district. The library closed briefly during World War II.
Thanks to the efforts of Gladys Cobb, a longtime schoolteacher and wife of Frank Cobb, the school’s principal, the library became part of the King County Rural Library District around 1943. In March 1957, the Black Diamond library was moved to the old teacher’s cottage, shown in this March 18, 1940, photo. The home was built in the early 1900s to house primarily single women hired as schoolteachers.
When Pacific Coast began liquidating their company town in 1939, the teacher’s cottage was deeded to the Black Diamond School District, which offered the site to the library. It was located next to the First Presbyterian Church, a 1910 wooden structure that burned to the ground in the early morning hours of January 5, 1959.
To convert the aging home, members of the PTA and other volunteers installed sheetrock over wooden walls, installed new shelving, laid linoleum, and painted to spruce up the structure. A.R. Botts leveled the ground in front of the library, while Ann Steiert, co-founder of the Black Diamond Historical Society, donated curtains. Jewell McCloud and Ruth Zumek were librarians. Jewell’s husband, Darrel McCloud, built the shelving, magazine racks, checkout desk, and stools. Bonnie Merrill succeeded as librarian, and Alice Norton served later.
Black Diamond was incorporated as a city on February 19, 1959, by a narrow vote of 170 to 144. By the mid-1960s, plans were afoot to build a proper city hall that would also house the police station and library. Construction began in July 1967, financed by a $67,000 general obligation bond approved the prior November.
On Sunday, April 28, 1968, the new 4,206-square-foot building was dedicated in a ceremony featuring Rev. Donald Klinger, delivering the invocation; Mayor Louie Zumek, providing a welcome address; remarks by the town’s first mayor, Lloyd Hagen; plus, a benediction by Father Charles Cross. The combined city hall, police station, and library building was constructed on the site of the old Presbyterian Church and adjacent to the teacher’s cottage. Today, the library portion of the former City Hall is used for Black Diamond Council meetings.
In 1990, the local library was absorbed into the King County Library System (KCLS). As the space needed for City Hall increased, it was time for the peripatetic library to find a new home. In 1991, the library’s book collection was moved from City Hall to a 2,000-square-foot portion of a larger building on Roberts Drive constructed by then councilman Mario Sorci for his Anesthesia Equipment Supply Company.
In the fall of 2001, KCLS began searching for a new library site. At a meeting that fall, citizens gathered with the library system director, Bill Ptacek, and a three-acre lot on Jones Lake Road with commanding views of Mt. Rainier and the lake was selected. An agreement was signed with the property owner, Palmer Coking Coal Co., but the City of Black Diamond’s condition that KCLS build a sidewalk from the elementary school to the library squelched the deal. Instead, a two-acre site was acquired on Roberts Drive, where a 5,000-square-foot facility was constructed. In May 2008, over 150 people attended its grand opening.
This brief history of the Black Diamond Library was sourced from Museum Newsletters, the Black Diamond History Facebook site, HistoryLink.org, King County Assessor records for tax parcel 084400-0975, and Voice of the Valley & Enumclaw Courier-Herald articles.
