Shingle making was a prominent early industry. The process was slow, done entirely by hand, in vivid contrast with the great facility and productiveness of the modern shingle mills of this region; in consequence of the slowness of manufacture they formerly brought a much higher price. It was an ideal occupation at that time. After the mammoth cedars were felled, sawn and rived asunder, the shingle-maker sat in the midst of the opening in the great forest, towering walls of green on all sides, with the blue sky overhead and fragrant wood spread all around, from which he shaped the thin, flat pieces by shaving them with a drawing knife. Cutting and hewing spars to load ships for foreign markets began before 1856. As recorded in a San Francisco paper: "In 1855, the bark Anadyr sailed from Utsalady on Puget Sound, with a cargo of spars for the French navy yard at Brest. In 1857 the same ship took a load from the same place to an English navy yard. "To China, Spain, Mauritius and many other places, went the tough, enduring, flexible fir tree of Puget Sound. The severe test applied have proven the Douglas fir to be without an equal in the making of masts and spars. "In later days the Fram, of Arctic fame, was built of Puget Sound fir." The discovery and opening of the coal mines near Seattle marks an epoch in the commerce of the Northwest. As early as 1859 coal was found and mined on a small scale east of Seattle. The first company, formed in 1866-7, was composed of old and well-known citizens: D. Bagley, G. F. Whitworth and Selucius Garfield, who was called the "silver-tongued orator." Others joined in the enterprise of developing the mines, which were found to be extensive and valuable. Legislation favored them and transportation facilities grew. The names of McGilvra, Yesler, Denny and Robinson were prominent in the work. Tramways, chutes, inclines, tugboats, barges, coalcars and locomotives brought out the coal to deep water on the Sound, across Lakes Washington and Union, and three pieces of railroad. A long trestle at the foot of Pike Street, Seattle, at which the ship "Belle Isle," among others, often loaded, fell in, demolished by the work of the teredo. The writer remembers two startling trips up the incline, nine hundred feet long, on the east side of Lake Washington, in an empty coal car, the second time duly warned by the operatives that the day before a car load of furniture had been "let go" over the incline and smashed to kindlingwood long before it reached the bottom. The trips were made amidst an oppressive silence and were never repeated.