Newcastle City Hall is located at 12835 Newcastle Way, Newcastle, WA 98056.
Phone: 425‑649‑4444.
Neighborhoods
The City of Newcastle was incorporated in 1994.
Beginnings [1]
The history of Newcastle is as rich as the veins of black coal and mines that lay beneath the City's ground. These mines, which were Seattle and King County’s earliest large industry, formed the basis for transforming Seattle from a small but ambitious village in the 1860s into the dominant port city on Puget Sound by the 1880s. Prospectors and coal-miners worked the Newcastle Hills for 100 years, mining nearly 11 million tons of coal from under the surface of Cougar Mountain.
As a result, two mining towns grew from rural, agricultural villages to bustling company towns almost overnight: Old Newcastle and Coal Creek. The present City of Newcastle sits directly on the site of Old Newcastle. Between 1880 and 1890, the economy of Newcastle went the way of its mineral resource. The coal was relatively low quality compared with other coal producing areas of the United States and the Newcastle mines operated on a marginal economic basis throughout their history.
Union confrontations between 1880 and 1890 and the breaking of the unions later resulted in the deterioration of the coal mining industry. When the Pacific Coast Coal Company left in 1929, the coal dependent towns disappeared too. Except for abandoned mines and one miner's residence that is in near-original condition, little evidence remains of the two colorful communities, which once had as many as 600 houses between them.
Nearby Towns: Renton City • Town of Beaux Arts Vlg •