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Local Life

Civic odds and ends, neighborhood stories, local color, public safety, schools, and daily Boise life.

An illustration in the style of a hand-tinted vintage photograph: a small-town gymnasium stage framed by a red velvet curtain and glowing footlights, where an elaborate model railroad of a coal town circles in place of a chorus line, a pink feather fan and a bitten apple left at the edge of the stage, and a man and a child watching from the gym floor.

Local Life/October 1, 2026

Gracie Hansen's World's Fair theater now hosts a train show

The Maple Valley Model Train Show, October 17 and 18, fills a Ravensdale gym that was Gracie Hansen's burlesque theater at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair.

An illustration of an isometric tabletop scale model: forested hills beside a small river gorge, a pale excavated terrace set among the trees as a removable piece, four toy dump trucks on a thin road, and two alternate terrace pieces, a spare truck and a heap of loose model trees waiting on the table beside it.

Local Life/October 1, 2026

Segale gravel mine near Cumberland: what King County ruled

What Segale wants to build north of Cumberland, what King County ruled on July 8, 2026, who decides next, and the October 13 meeting in Enumclaw.

A hand-embroidered panel on dark wool: a row of glowing orange stitched beehive ovens under fir trees on the left, a single gold thread running across the cloth to a tall grey smokestack on a bay at the right, the smokestack's stitches coming loose and hanging as threads.

Local Life/September 30, 2026

Wilkeson coke ovens: the smelter is gone, the ovens remain

Wilkeson's beehive coke ovens baked fuel for the Tacoma smelter that became ASARCO. Its stack fell in 1993. Thirty of the ovens are still standing.

A 1920s pulp-magazine cover painting of a small-town main street at golden hour: shopkeepers with shotguns in doorways around a bullet-holed black touring car, while above them, painted like a faded memory in the sky, two men in 1890s frock coats walk away down railroad tracks carrying bulging carpetbags.

Local Life/September 30, 2026

Buckley bank robbery, 1925: two gunmen died in the street

In 1925 Buckley's marshal and merchants shot two bank robbers dead on Main Street. The town had a tip; an earlier bank was reportedly emptied by its officers.

An antique stereograph card with two sepia photographs side by side: on the left a coal mine hoist and wooden houses on dry, treeless California hills; on the right the same hoist and houses among tall dark firs.

Local Life/September 30, 2026

Black Diamond is named for a coal seam in California

Black Diamond, Washington, took its name and first families from Nortonville, California, a coal town that emptied to build it. Only ours kept the name.

A cyanotype-style illustration in deep Prussian blue: the pale silhouettes of two pairs of adult hands holding a folded letter, laid over the faint white lines of a 1930s architectural drawing of a two-story tile-roofed building with an arched covered walkway, with the outline of Mount Rainier behind.

Local Life/September 29, 2026

Rainier School in Buckley: its history and its wind-down

Parents lobbied Buckley's Rainier School into being in 1937. In 2025 the group they founded backed the law winding it down. Its history, and what comes next.

A painted board game scene in which a long column of tiny toy tractors crawls along a two-lane road across green farmland toward a small amphitheatre with a red triangular roof, while a single large hand reaches in from above holding a second amphitheatre piece on a rocky bluff above a winding blue river, as if collecting both.

Local Life/September 29, 2026

White River Amphitheatre: a road, a tribe and a rivalry

The Muckleshoot amphitheatre near Enumclaw took eight years to open. The neighbors who fought it hired the Gorge operator's law firm. Then one company got both.

A cutaway view of the ground beneath a small foothills town, showing a large old water main running under a street and a railroad trail, with river water flowing through it toward a distant city and a small valve vault tapped into it, with a thin stream of clear water running from the connection.

Local Life/September 29, 2026

Tacoma's water main runs through Enumclaw

Since 1913 Tacoma has piped the Green River through Enumclaw. The town keeps an emergency valve on it, and in 1987 Enumclaw's water went into Tacoma's pipe.

A painted still life on a dark wooden table: a coil of dried brown hop vine wound around a dented steel milk can, one fresh green hop cone resting on a closed leather ledger tied with ribbon, and a small wooden model of a pyramid-roofed hop kiln with a curl of smoke rising from its top, an unlit brass lamp beside it, with a window behind opening onto flat green pasture, grazing cows and a snow-covered volcano.

Local Life/September 29, 2026

Enumclaw hops history: before the cows, there were hops

Enumclaw grew hops before cows. Lice and the Panic of 1893 wiped out the crop, and a surviving grower helped found what is now Mutual of Enumclaw.

A vintage style scene of a milk can in a top hat and a peach in a lace veil at a small wooden altar by a foggy mountain lake, with a winding highway behind them and a crowd and a movie camera fading into the fog.

Local Life/September 28, 2026

Chinook Pass history: the 1931 mock wedding in the fog

On Sept. 13, 1931, thousands drove to Tipsoo Lake to marry Mr. Cream of Enumclaw to Miss Peaches of Yakima, in fog, for a road that opened nine months later.

A painting of a 1959 one-room schoolroom where children seen from behind watch a glowing television at the front while a school bus waits outside the window in the rain.

Local Life/September 28, 2026

The last one-room schools in King County, near Enumclaw

The plateau once had more than a dozen tiny school districts. The last two one-room schools in King County were near Enumclaw in 1959. How they were folded in.

A mid-century style painting in which rain over the Seattle waterfront turns into snowflakes at a dotted line in the sky, falling as snow on red barns and fields on the plateau below Mount Rainier.

Local Life/September 28, 2026

Enumclaw snow: Seattle's total, twice the freezing nights

About a foot a year each, in the long weather records. What Enumclaw gets is twice the freezing nights and the marginal storms decided by a few hundred feet.

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