1.1.13 O. K. Coal Company

In 1932, black rock miner Orry King came out to Washington State from his native West Virginia to see his old military buddy S.B. Clinard - who, years earlier, had promised him clean air, cold clear streams and heaping plates of good food at his logging camp dining hall. Orry, fond of free eats when he could get them, immediately quit his on and off again job at the Kaymore Mines and headed west as fast as his coach ticket could take him.

Enjoying the bounty of the logger's table, Orry walked the hills of the Olympic Peninsula hunting for deer for the supper table. Stopping in a small grove some miles from the logging camp to eat his sack lunch, Orry espied a black band of color in a hillside opposite his improvised lunch site. Recognizing the band as an outcropping of coal, Orry immediately headed back to camp to tell S.B the good news.

Recognizing an opportunity when he saw it, SB organized the O.K. Coal Company and put Orry to work as General Manager and Mine Supervisor. Orry wrote home immediately for his best mining buddies to come to work and used his experience in the Kaymore Mine to engineer the above ground mine buildings while OPLC timber cruisers surveyed the new right of way to Orry's mine site and the WWSL MOW department began plans to run track into the area now known as Coal Grove.

S.B rounded up his under-employed logging crews and began building the railroad extension and got his sawmill into increased production to supply building materials for the tipple and storehouses and timbers for the mine shaft and coal galleries underground. He further persuaded Orry to build a power plant next to his mine to provide electrical service to the mine, the logging camp nearby and down to Montesano.

The Northwest Portland Cement plant in Potland, Ore heard of this new mother lode and was the first customer of the new coal company. With a contract for thousands of tons of cement to manufacture for the Grand Coulee Dam project, NWPC needed a steady supplier of quality coal - something they were unable to get from the inferior coal from the mines east of Seattle.

The O.K. Coal Company became an important employer for Montesano citizens during the Great Depression - and Orry's free coal program for widows and orphans homes during the winter certainly made for good headlines when most news was bad.

In 1938, the original wood tipple was burned down in a fire and a new tipple of iron and corrugated steel was built, as was a coal wash. That same year Orry was elected by the voters to serve in the State Legislature where he authored legislation to make coal mines safer.

World War II brought another increase in traffic and after the war the construction of paper mills in the Grays Harbor area continued to provide the O.K.Coal Company a continued customer base when home and government demand for coal was diminishing.

The O.K. Coal company employees 214 miners working 237 days, with an annual production amounting to 308,000 tons of coal.