Old Benson Road

Everywhere you go, you travel on ground with a past, with an untold story or one that has been forgotten.  This is most evident in our roads, the old roads.  Some, like the Beacon-Coal Mine road that takes off from 128th Avenue in Skyway past the trailer court and winds down the Black River Valley wall to come out on Monster Road by the transfer station, have faded into the background, travelled by few and forgotten by most.

Others, like today’s subject, Old Benson Road, and in particular one stretch of it from Cascade Vista on top of the South Hill to Main Street in downtown Renton, are travelled daily by thousands of us on our way to work.

Old Benson today is not the same road it was, thanks to the recent “improvements” to I-405 that did hand those of us who live on the hill our own private onramp to get us to the traffic jam quicker and easier.  The new Old Benson that emerged from that project was higher and jogged to the East as it went under the new onramp.

For years, like so many of us, I noticed some kind of platform structure on the east side of old Benson at a wide spot in the road just up from the building that became City Hall.  It had some kind of plaque on the base of it visible as you went up the hill.  I always wondered what it was about, but you know how it goes, there’s always something to do and gotta get there soon, so who had time to stop and read the plaque?

Finally, after at least 15 years of driving by on a daily basis, I stopped off one Saturday morning on my way to McLendon’s and actually read the plaque.  What it said was that the plaque had been affixed to the base of a foundation for the steam donkey that ran the winch that brought the ore cars from the inside of the coal mine whose adit was under what is now the S-curves of Interstate 405 directly to the east.  The top of the base was at about level with the road surface, and appeared to be made of solid concrete cast in sections, or mortared in place like giant bricks.  The date on the plaque was 1949.

I went to the Renton Historical Society museum down on Main street for the rest of the story.  It seems that there was actually a dedication ceremony for the Coal Mine Hoist foundation, as it is officially known, last August, but we missed it.

There was a man named Smithers who found coal on the side of Talbot hill back in 1873.  With financial help from Capt. Renton, the Renton Coal Company dug into the hill right there off Benson Road and, by the time they quit in 1918, extracted some 1,300,000 tons of coal from a mine that went a full mile east of there, with some 22 branchings and many air shafts, one of which opened up under a Renton Hill garage in 1981.  They rediscovered the mine entrance in 1963, when the I-405 was built, and sealed it up again.  The rest of the mine is still there, full of water, mostly.

It’s a good thing I stopped to read the plaque when I did, because you can’t get there anymore.  With the relocation of Old Benson, the plaque is still there, but now it’s down below the road surface behind a fence on your right as you crest the hill before the bridge over 405, and the wide spot in the road is long gone.  You’d have to park at City Hall and walk up the hill to see it now.  Who’s gonna do that?

Like the aerial photographs of the Cascade Vista neighborhood that used to be on the wall at Willie’s Tavern, like the woods full of deer around Philip Arnold Park, things that are part of the history of our neighborhoods are disappearing around us.  Keep telling yourself to stop and enjoy them while you still can.  If you wait 15 years, they may be gone.  Then all you’ll have left are the memories.  :-{)}