History:
The Green River region lies about 30 miles southeast of Seattle on a flat bench of glacial gravel. Its perimeters are older sedimentary mountains to the west and north, with the Cedar River forming a snaking northern boundary; towering Cascade foothills to the east; and the lush Enumclaw floodplain to the south. Black Diamond lies in the heart of the Green River region. Millions of years ago, an array of geologic occurrences converged in this area to create difficult and expensive coal beds, and impoverished possibilities for farming and forestry. The area is cooler than Seattle and twice as wet, which means much of Black Diamond's history took place in the rain.

The Black Diamond Coal Company was organized and started work in 1864, in Nortonville, Contra Costa County, California. In 1873 four men took up claim in the Green River area and formed the Green River Coal Company. About the same time California speculators, aware of the fact that the abundant Mt. Diablo mine at Nortonville, California would soon be depleted, began their investigations in the Pacific Northwest. One of them bought out the Green River Coal Company, but because of the low quality of exposed coal, the fields were not developed. In the spring of 1880, P.B. Cornwall, President of the Black Diamond Coal Mining Company, sent Victor Tull to explore possibilities on Puget Sound. He discovered an abundance of higher quality coal a few miles north in the future Black Diamond-Franklin-Ravensdale district.B.B. Jones, a coal expert, was sent north to continue the prospecting. The Company immediately started to open the first big Black Diamond mine, No. 14. On April 7, 1882, 800 pounds of Black Diamond coal was sent to San Francisco for testing. Its quality so impressed Cornwall and Morgans, his superintendent, that they came north in June.

By 1885, Mt. Diablo was dead and the predominantly Welsh Nortonville miners moved into the Green River Region, giving birth to Black Diamond and its surrounding settlements.A scramble for possession of the newly discovered veins involving Seattle, San Francisco and New York set the stage for two crucial processes-one was the development of a huge monopoly over Northwest transportation by a New York financier, Henry Villard, through NP and the Oregon Improvement Company, and the other several million dollar survey of soil, timber and mineral potential which Villard inspired.By 1882 the pattern for Green River economics had been determined. The Black Diamond Company and Oregon Improvement Company along with Northern Pacific developed the mines and dominated the Green River field throughout its history.