The successful export of coal and the early success of this town called Newcastle are, quite simply, inexorably linked.

But exactly how the coal was extracted from deep within the coal seams of Newcastle and transported to the awaiting economic lifeline of Seattle’s shores — especially as full mine operations started in Newcastle in September 1871— was far from easy. The loads were transferred a whopping 11 times from start to finish.

Photo courtesy of the Renton Historical Society and Museum The Ant, the first steam engine in the Puget Sound area and second in the state of Washington, was shipped from San Francisco to the Seattle area in the winter of 1871 to enable the transfer of Newcastle coal from Lake Union to the Elliot Bay area.

The coal from Newcastle was generally San Francisco bound after being loaded onto ships in Seattle, but the Puget Sound area would get something in return from the Bay area — its first steam railroad system.

The Ant, brought up from San Francisco in the winter of 1871 to enable the transfer of coal from Lake Union to the Elliot Bay area, would be a major improvement to further Newcastle’s ability to export coal, local train expert Russ Segner said.

Until the addition of the first edition, coal was transported by a series of various modes of transportation, including hauls by mules, horses, trams and flatboats.

“Mules were the sole motive power underground,” writes Richard K. McDonald and Lucile McDonald in “The Coals of Newcastle: A Hundred Years of Hidden History.”

“Most of the animals’ lives were spent there in darkness hauling out mine cars. Horses then pulled the larger tram cars to the incline above the landing where the bulk coal was loaded onto a scow.”

While the Ant was a relatively small locomotive (it was called the Ant for a reason) that could only pull eight loaded cars, or about five tons worth of coal, it was a serious improvement to the system, Segner said.

“This was much more efficient as the loads got heavier,” he said. “It also meant they needed less people to operate the trains than you needed for horses … the whole venture was probably pretty good sized by Seattle standards at the time.”

The addition of the Ant was only the second steam railroad in the state, according to “The Coals of Newcastle.”

But within four short years, the George C. Bode, a slightly larger engine, replaced the Ant on the Seattle leg of the coal route. Three years later, it would be put into service in the Seattle & Walla Walla Railroad in 1875.

In Kurt E. Armbruster’s “Orphan Road: The Railroad Comes to Seattle,” Armbruster describes Seattle’s first run at the steam engine railroad as it looked to improve and expand the lines in the future.

“Since 1872 the little city had listened to the daily tootings and chuffings of the tiny engines Ant and Geo. C. Bode of the Seattle Coal & Transportation Co. as they lugged cars of Newcastle coal from Lake Union along Pike Street to the waterfront.”

While the Ant would be put out of commission from the coal route, it would find a home until the 1940s hauling new loads for a logging company in Oregon, Segner said.

But the engine, a critical piece of railroading history in the Puget Sound and to the successful coal mining of Newcastle, would be lost to history forever after it was mistakenly collected for a World War II scrap drive.

“It’s just one of those things where things get lost,” Segner said.

In 1981, Vickie Baima Olson took a trip with her father to the tiny village of Piano Audi, Italy, where her great-grandparents were born.

The trip would change how she would come view her family, and herself, for years to come.

“We went to a cemetery where a lot of the headstones had the same last name as mine,” Olson said. “They put pictures on their graves there. There was a picture there of a woman, and I thought, ‘My gosh, she looks like she could be my twin.’”

Vickie Olson’s father’s side, the Baima family, emigrated to Newcastle to mine coal in the area as early as 1900. Photo contributed by Vickie Baima

That moment sparked an interest in Olson, a third-generation Newcastle resident, and her family since.

As a longtime humanities and social studies middle school teacher for the Issaquah School District, Olson said she’s always been interested in research and learning more about the past.

In 2000, Olson said she got serious when it came to uncovering her roots. She started learning more about her family through records, such as birth certificates, death certificates, marriage documents and others through the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History Center in Bellevue, online and through family testimonials.

She’s even started to learn the Italian language.

“It’s something that you just kind of get hooked on,” she said. “People will start looking for something and discover something, and it’s almost like things just start falling into place.”

Olson knows both sides of her lineage emigrated from Italy, but she said she still has questions about how — and why — they came to this country.

“As Italians, they were looked down upon,” she said. “They were discriminated against. The struggles of leaving everything familiar behind and then coming to a country where they’re completely unfamiliar … for them to be able to surmount all of the barriers and all of the things they had to go through, for me, was pretty inspirational.”

“My dad’s side of the family is fairly transparent,” she said. “Then, I started trying to find my mom’s ancestors and there still are so many mysteries. There are so many twists and turns. There were a lot more difficulties.”

Although Newcastle was only incorporated as a town in 1994, Olson’s family has been in the area for at least 110 years, showing up on the U.S. Census as early as 1900.

Olson’s father’s side of her family, the Baimas, worked as coal miners in the Newcastle area. The Baima House, an original coal company house that has been preserved and listed on the historical register, and one of the few historical structures still standing in Newcastle, bears her family name.

Olson’s mother’s side of the family, the DeLeos, farmed 180 acres of land that remains intact near the south side of the Cougar Mountain Wildland Park. The family received the acreage under the Federal Land Grant Act before Washington was established as a state.

Anyone interested in their family’s genealogy should start interviewing living relatives as soon as possible, she said.

“If people want to do this, they really are a gold mine of information,” she said. “I still think about things that I wish I could go back and ask my father since he passed away.”

A wealth of information can be found in guidebooks and online, as well as documents available through the Family History Center. The centers are a branch of facilities of the Family History Library in Salt Lake City and can be used by anyone interested in looking for answers in the past.

“Who we are, really, and not just what we look like, but a lot of our values and our cultural characteristics, we owe to our ancestors,” Olson said.

Rumor has it that this still, displayed during the annual Newcastle Days, once belonged to former Newcastle resident Lee Martin. Lee’s son, Frank Martin, estimates that between the 1940s until the early 1950s, he helped his father make almost 10,000 gallons of moonshine near their Newcastle home. Contributed

Alerted by a disgruntled neighbor, several cars filled with federal agents anxious to find an illegal moonshine still swarmed up the Martins’ dirt driveway that Saturday morning in Newcastle.

“They tore the place apart trying to find something,” Frank said. “They searched the chicken coop, looked in the pig pen, checked the garden — they even inspected our furnace.”

The agents even questioned Martin.

“I remember one man pulling me aside to ask if I knew anything,” he said. “I was only a little boy at the time, maybe 8 or 9, and I was scared. I just kept saying over and over, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’”

The agents called off the search after finding nothing that hinted at the presence of a still, but they weren’t convinced Lee Martin was innocent.

Three weeks passed before the strange cars keeping vigil at the foot of the Martin property disappeared. Lee waited another week before fetching the still out of hiding and firing it back up.

Thanks to a tipoff from the local authorities who enjoyed his particular brew, Lee knew about the impending raid in advance. There was just enough time to feed most of the fermented mash to his pigs and hide the rest — including the still — in the woods now known as Cougar Mountain Wildland Park before agents arrived.

Lee realized that if he was going to continue making moonshine, the still needed an undetectable location.

He found it right outside his back door. The looming mass of blackberry bushes in the Martins’ back yard offered the perfect spot.

Carefully digging into the middle of the thorny mass, Lee hollowed out an area wide enough to hold the cooking stove and high enough to fit the still.

When it came time to cook the mash, Lee poked a small stovepipe up through the brambles that helped dissipate the smoke. Once the mash was cooked, the pipe was pulled back inside the hollowed center, leaving no sign that the blackberry bushes were anything but an overgrown, brambly heap of vicious thorns.

The Martins were back in business.

How Lee outwitted federal agents is just one of the many stories Frank, 70, who now lives in Renton, chuckles over when recalling a moonshine-steeped, Newcastle boyhood.

“It was around 1944 or so when I first started helping Dad make the whiskey,” he said. “I remember my father kept telling me, ‘You need to learn how to count.’ So I learned, and my first job was counting the gallon jugs of moonshine on the cellar shelf — all the way to 50.”

As he grew older, responsibilities increased.

If he wasn’t scrubbing out the mash barrels and prepping them for the next load, he was lugging heavy buckets of water from the nearby creek to pour over the still’s condenser coils to ensure the alcohol didn’t evaporate when it dripped into the gallon jugs.

Fortunately, moonshine making was mostly a weekend event. During the week, the mash was left to ferment in one of three 50-gallon barrels while Lee worked in the local coalmines. Saturday was cook day and ran from 5 a.m. to 9 p.m., or until all the fermented mash was processed.

Sunday was delivery day.

“We’d cook about 100 gallons of mash per month, and that gave us between 40 and 50 gallons of whiskey,” Frank said. “Come Sunday, when everyone else was in church, we’d drop it off at the local store.”

Frank estimates that between 1944 until the early 1950s, he helped his father make almost 10,000 gallons of moonshine.

“You can make moonshine from many things,” Frank said. “We made it from peaches, corn, plums, even apples.”

While flavor was certainly important for the customers, purity was paramount for Lee. Some moonshiners would cut corners by running their whiskey through old car radiators that leached lead into the moonshine, giving unwitting patrons lead poisoning.

Not so with Lee. Frank said his father refused to use anything in his still except silver solder or hand-rolled copper to avoid accidental seeping.

Alcohol proof level also helped determine product purity.

“Dad would flick moonshine drops onto an open flame to determine its strength,” Frank said. “If the flame was yellow, it was less than 80 proof and had to be run through the still again. If the color flashed bright blue, it meant the whiskey was 150 proof and ready to go.”

Moonshine wasn’t just a drink with a potent kick, it was currency for cash-strapped times.

“Moonshine was what kept the food coming in for us when there were no jobs to be had,” Frank said. “We’d deliver the jugs to the local store, the owner would count them … for when we came back later in the week to pick up groceries.”

Lee would eventually receive another tipoff.

“Someone told Dad that the last Newcastle mines were going to close in six months and that he should find another job before everyone else started looking,” Frank said.

Lee took the advice. He soon landed a clay mixer’s job in Renton but realized that doing so meant making a serious decision.

While Newcastle’s sparse population had allowed him the privacy he needed to run a still, Renton was a whole different matter. For safety’s sake, the still had to be shut down for good.

After almost six years of moonshining, Lee gave the still away to an old friend and moved his family to a new life in Renton.

He never returned to Newcastle.

But his legacy still lives here.

Rumor has it that the still displayed during the annual Newcastle Days once belonged to Lee Martin.